If you’re building a content platform, you MUST have exclusive content – the kind of content people can only find on your platform. You can have non-exclusive content as well, but those are “shelf space fillers”; at the end of the day, people need a reason to go to your platform, download your app, etc.
Then how do you get exclusive content? Obviously you can invest money/equity/whatever to produce or source exclusive content. Netflix spending tens of billions of dollars a year to create original series is one such example.
Or, another way is for your platform to become a de facto standard for certain type of content. Think TikTok, Medium, Calm, etc. They’ve built such a dominating platform and brand for a particular type of medium that the content on these platforms, which may not be exclusive, effectively works like exclusive content. Is Calm the only place where you can find meditation content? No. Do a lot of people interested in meditation go to Calm first? Yes. And at that point, whatever content they see on Calm is the primary (and possibly only) content they see about meditation.
When your platform becomes the destination for both consumption and creation of certain type of content, you can build a very powerful platform. You’ll also see the flywheel working, where consumers become creators, and vice versa. The content on your platform would essentially work like exclusive content – of course, professionally created “real” exclusive content will only add to the strength of the platform even more.