As someone who spends most of their day consuming, creating and studying content, I know that we are living in transformative times in the news sector. Throughout most of my career on the PR side, the media had all the power. They were the ultimate arbiters of what was important and what was not. The all-powerful gatekeepers.

When content migrated from print to digital, the media continued to have its grip on what was consumed by the business-to-business professional public. However, the media lost that powerful grip when it gave away its content for free. At that point, there was no turning back. The genie was out of the bottle and everything was free and available for everyone to consume.

As a result, ad revenue began a fairly dramatic and quick descent and the rest is history. Literally! Content now comes from anyone with a great blog on a wordpress site. It comes from people sharing on social media. And it comes from professionals and companies alike. Traditional trade media is slowly heading towards extinction as we know it.

So where is all of this headed? What's next?

Look no further than Spotify to understand what the future of content looks like. Spotify doesn't create the content, it curates it for its audiences based on their own unique preferences.

The real estate sector will soon realize that the same powerful trends impacting music will be the norm in news and information. Think Apple News. Same concept. Curated news for consumers by topic and interest.

And the most exciting part of this trend is that more original content will be created to fill the void left behind by trade media. It's honestly the most exciting and impactful trend I have seen in my thirty years in the business. Professionals and companies are waking up to the idea that they will become the new media by demonstrating their own expertise and sharing it with the industry.

But to fully take advantage of this trend and massive opportunity, it's key to understand that your site, your blog, etc. aren't the destination where they will consume the content.

Back to Spotify. They take only the songs you like and stream that to you. That's what the future of real estate content will look like. Same as what’s happening on Facebook. Everything is curated.

It’s why I built our site, The News Funnel. We are THE Spotify for real estate content. We built an enormous library of real estate content. Thousands of sources. And every single piece of content gets analyzed and distributed to our subscribers based on their interests. And so while it's free to get your content on our site, if you want it to be consumed on a platform like ours, it needs to be really good.

And so my advice to the content creators is the following...

Create more content, not less.Get your content into the right hands. Connect with other content creators with large audiences to leverage their followers. You need as many eyeballs as you can get.Make sure your content varies from post to post as much as possible to peak as many different people's unique interests.Share as much and as often as you can on as many social networks as possible.Engage with your audience to understand what they like and what they don't. Get better every day at understanding where the demand is and for what.

Over the next few years I am confident that we will see an explosion of new content sources. The era where the platforms will be the source where people get their news is upon us. Therefore, the ability to understand how to get your content to stand out will be as important as ever!