Once they’re used to having entities they trust take them to highly-quality online magazines and other sources of web content, people will be ready to be similarly guided to specific articles within these that deal with a particular subject.

For example, if a user likes the magazines, blogs, podcasts, or other collections of content that a curator going by the name of WebMaven has guided him to, this user could further specify that at the moment, he wants to see material about affordable housing.  He’d be shown all the WebMaven-recommended pages on this topic—which could often include content from sources where it would never have occurred to the user to look.

In this approach to content discovery, Web Maven might get two cents out of the standard dime the customer pays to read (or otherwise consume) the content item.

Who would WebMaven be?  In some cases, they might be a well-known figure who broad swaths of the general public are already familiar with and trust.  But they could just as well be the kind of person who simply shares lots of links with their friends and other social media contacts.  (In the latter case, the advantage of the new curation service would be that readers could see just the material that focuses on the topic they’re interested in at the moment, without having to wade through hundreds of posts about subjects all over the map.)