Tyler Cowen is an economist who maintains a blog at Marginal Revolution. Every day he shares a collection of links with his readers, and he has done so since 2008.

Cowen is a busy person. He teaches at a university, chairs the board of a think tank, runs a grant program, interviews public figures for a podcast, and writes a book every two years or so. Cowen is also fairly explicit about how he chooses to spend his time. He takes a ‘portfolio approach’ in achieving his goals. He ‘thinks at the margin’, continually asking if he should be investing more or less of his time on any given activity. And he identifies ‘underrated’ opportunities, whose value might be overlooked by most.

So it seems reasonable to ask — what is it about this daily act of curation that has led to Cowen keeping it in his portfolio for so long? Are there aspects of link curation that are underrated?

The most obvious benefit of posting a selection of links every day is that it’s an easy way of creating content for your blog. Readers learn to reliably expect to have something to read on a daily basis, and this generates an audience for your main offering. Having a collection of interesting links to share each day isn’t a big effort for someone who already spends his time looking for new things to read, and in Cowen’s case, his own readers regularly send him content for sharing.

Are there other, less obvious, benefits? One way an economist might look at the role of curator is as the intermediary in a two-sided market. On one side, blog readers want to consume content relevant to their interest. On the other side, content creators are looking for an audience.

It’s a familiar framework for analysing services like TikTok, where the ‘curator’ is some algorithm that attempts to tailor its curation policy to each individual user. In business-oriented examples like these, the resulting policies flow from the desire to maximise some objective quantity, such as audience size or engagement.

If Cowen was simply trying to maximize his audience, his curation policy would be similarly constrained. But what if he has other goals?

Thinking about the content creation side of the marketplace, Cowen is able to use the daily links post to increase demand for content that he himself wants to see more of. This is true in an indirect way, where simply directing traffic to certain content will incentivize creators to make more of it. We each, individually, produce this sort of impact on a tiny scale when browsing the web, and Cowen is able to magnify his own through sharing the sorts of content he enjoys most.

But more directly, by being so consistent in linking to content that matches his interests, Cowen further incentivizes his own readers to produce more of it. Marginal Revolution’s audience isn’t enormous, but it is unusual. Readers include tech CEOs, crypto billionaires, maybe Rishi Sunak, and a decent chunk of the DC policy space. If you want access to that audience, all you need to do is write with Cowen in mind. In terms of content, that might mean a post about South American textiles, or Paul McCartney, or Marginal Revolution itself. If you don’t want to be limited by topic, just incorporate Cowen’s ways of thinking — ask if something is underrated or not, suggest that incentives matter, or highlight the importance of context in whatever it is you’re talking about. I’m not trying to suggest that this is some sort of trick for getting exposure — Cowen wants you to do this, and is happy to offer this deal to anyone willing to take it.

Within the two-sided market framework, Cowen can choose in this way not to optimise for what his audience wants in order to shape the content creation side towards his own interests.

What if he wished to similarly shape his audience? Most public commentators, if they want to bring their audience to a certain point of view, will make arguments in favour of that view. But Cowen is open about the fact that he is a ‘Straussian’, and that he frequently disguises his true views (producing an esoteric reading of something is another good way of ending up on the daily links page). A Straussian is often happy to simply get an argument in front of their readers, even if they have to actively distance themselves from it in order to do so.

If Cowen has a desire to expose his unusually powerful audience to certain content they wouldn’t otherwise see, without implicating himself as endorsing such content, then the daily links post seems like the perfect way to achieve this. With around 50 links shared each week, there’s a regular opportunity to direct attention to unusual places, while the bulk of the linked material remains free for satisfying a reader like maybe Rishi Sunak.

So is link curation underrated? For the particular sort of person Cowen is, it may have some more subtle benefits beyond just complementing the main blog offering. If you’re thinking about doing it yourself, it seems worth considering what you could achieve with curatorial powers of your own.