Where's the Money in User-Generated Content?

Clinton Dugan
May, 20th 2008


In the world today, virtually everyone has access to the internet. Merchants and retailers are taking this access to the head and generating new ides. The internet is big business but its even bigger business when it comes to User-Generated Content or UGC. In the article, Where's the Money in User-Generated Content it, it describes how companies like Facebook, Myspace and YouTube are generating ad sales and had great success. Ad sales on USG’s aren’t the ones that appear on TV or radio. They often appeal to what users of the websites have on a personal page.
The users personal pages often contain keywords that spark ads, thus generating the ads on some of your pages today. For example, if you have running as an interest, an ad for Nike could appear. This is important to many advertisement companies, however, they aren’t interested on what your page looks like. The article states that “its not the content of the site, it’s the millions of viewers and users that we care about.”
“MySpace, YouTube and others may have huge audiences, but to some, they are still just vehicles for self-expression, a modern take on writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper.”
There is still some skeptics, however, the future is still looking promising for investors and new UGC websites. I think this is important because of how UGC’s are becoming more and more popular. Most internet users use one of the top three UGC’s websites (Facebook, YouTube, Myspace). This is important to making money for companies, but in most cases its finding more and more users. Theses are the users that generate more revenue and usages of these sites. UGC’s are relevant in ways that they will be around as long as the internet still exist. Sure, we might see the downfall of the websites, but there will always be new ones up and coming.
The internet is a powerful tool with a lot of money still to be made, and I have a feeling marketers are still stressing this fact.

This article can be found at: http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/12221_3744306_2