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Content Arbitrage

Summary

“Content arbitrage” is the repurposing of existing content to increase its value by presenting it to a new audience or in a different format. It's based on the economic principle of arbitrage, leveraging undervalued content in one context for greater impact in another.


The most efficient way to create a content marketing strategy is to build on top of somebody else’s hard work.

Creating anything new—publishing a new content series, sharing a novel idea, solving a particular problem—is inherently risky. Despite your best guess, there is also the risk that the intended audience will simply not care about what you’ve created.

One way to side-step this existential risk is to build a content strategy on the back of existing, already-popular information. This is the core idea of content arbitrage: taking great ideas from one domain and translating them into another. That means:

  • Bringing information from disparate sources into one place (collating business memos into a blog post)

  • Transporting information from one format into another (from a research paper to a blog post, an interview to a video clip, etc.)

  • Translating information from one niche area into another (science into business, psychology into marketing, etc.)

This strategy draws from the economic principle of arbitrage, where assets are bought in one market at a low price and sold in another market at a higher price. Similarly, in content arbitrage, a piece of content that might be common or undervalued in one context is reused or repositioned in a different context where it can gain more traction or deliver more value, often with minimal additional effort.

For example:

  • Internal Tech Emails has amassed 415k followers by collating leaked emails from big tech companies into a single Twitter feed

  • CB Insights generates hundreds of thousands of pageviews by adding a layer of analysis and context on top of public business memos

  • George Collier has earned 673k YouTube subscribers by transcribing viral YouTube performances, famous concert solos, and excerpts from TV shows

In each instance, the content arbitrager finds a way to add additional value on top of the existing body of work. In the case of George Collier, for example:

  • Transcription is hard, and musicians can learn a lot from the analysis

  • Hours-long videos are transformed into short, pithy clips

  • He presents the content to a new, ultra-specific and largely unfamiliar audience

Remember: you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

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