If I hear the words “user created content” again I’m going to flame away.
Aaarrrrrrgggghghhhhhh.
Sorry, can’t tell you why I’m so nutty, but I’ve heard executives talk about this so many times today it’s driving me nuts.
Here’s the deal. Folks at media companies are using that phrase to talk about people who blog, write forum posts, and do stuff like add listings on Craig’s List. They see this as real important to their business models. Why? Because it gives incredible scale. Craig’s List, for instance, only has 18 employees. The rest is just “user created content.” Aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh. Now they have me doing it.
Hi Robert-
I don’t know that i agree with your thinking….
Here is the way I see it:
User Generated Content is…. content that some company didn’t have to pay people to manufacture.
Flickr, del.icio.us / digg.com, myspace, linkedin, various bloggers, a lot of the ‘web2.0′ crowd, etc:
They didn’t have to pay photographers to take the pictures and then license those pictures.
They didn’t have to pay journalists and editors a salary to spend all day dreaming up things to write about (like if you were CNN or WSJ).
They didn’t have to hire employees to think of clever sites to review or list out.
They didn’t have to pay anyone to score the information and categorize it.
…and as a result, they amassed two things:
1) a lot of content that is growing very quickly
2) viewers/readers/people interacting with this content
Paying people to build content costs big bucks and creates overhead. Big costs and big overhead make it difficult to scale a company quickly.
This is exactly why Yahoo is better off getting content from elsewhere instead of trying to hire your own newsdesk, talking heads, or blah blah blah resources that require salaries and $$$$. It is also likely the reason that your crew has bought many of these startups instead of hiring talk show personalities or gifted journalists to the Yahoo payroll.
Why is this better to have user generated content instead? Because businesses based on this type of content are more scalable and less likely to reach a growth plateau.
Content is still king…. owning the distribution channel is no longer necesary.
The more personalized, niche, and late breaking content that you have, the better off you are.
It would be impossible for a startup to build this amount of content on their own… and even if they could, the business wouldn’t scale.
….and hence…. user generated content is better than corporate generated content. Any way you slice it, there are more users than employees. And why such a generic term is applicable.
Personally, I like the term ‘user generated content’…. it is simple, clean, and short… even if the masters of the blogoverse don’t like it.
Best,
E. David Zotter
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