David RD Gratton

User generated content. If we don't own it, who get's paid?

May 16, 2006

Community sites with a high degree of user generated content are all the Web 2.0 rage these days.
Flickr
Friendster
TagWorld

YouTube
Project Opus
Our Media
Anything this guy talks about
A lot of things this guy talks about
and of course the juggernaut:

There literally are too many to list. If anyone knows of an extensive list I can point to let me know.

An interesting thing has popped up on most (not all) of the sites.
Advertising. Ok, it's not that interesting.
Don't get me wrong advertising is a legitimate way of driving revenue for an on-line business. In fact many of the people I have talked to about their community sites have said they are going to base their entire business model around advertising. Now I admit that's a touch scary. Shades of of 2001! Yipes! Still subscription and advertising has always been a legitimate way for news papers and magazines to run a business.

So anyway.

What I do find interesting is that most of the community sites are following the traditional publishing model, yet the differences between traditional publishing and user generated content sites tells me that this model is flawed.

First, community sites for the most part go out of their way in their membership/submission/terms-of-use agreements to state that ALL content uploaded to the sites belongs 100% to the user. Sites are scared (with reason) that a user will upload content that infringes on copyrights, or insights hate, or is in plain bad taste. Community sites simply do not want to be liable for the content on the page that the community generates. Now I know some Fleet Street papers would like to distance themselves from the content on their pages, but they can't.

Second, I go to a community site predominantly to engage with the community through conversation. I am not overly interested in the editorial that the owners of the site may publish. Sure some of it is interesting, but it is not the driving factor.

Third, traditional magazines pay reporters, writers, critics, and photographers for the content they publish. No one pays the community for the content they generate. Yet the better the community content and interaction, the longer I stay, the more pages I view, the more ads I see, and the more ads I click.

Clearly compensation to the community participants is in order. Should not the popular profiles on MySpace be compensated for driving and holding traffic?

Of course the builders of the community site are also owed a living - plus it's expensive hosting all that content. They created the service, helped guide the culture, and invested time ad/or money to build the infrastructure that supports the community. They need some monetary love, too.

Clearly the members of the community own the content and are the primary drivers of viewer/readership. It would seem to me that some sort of revenue sharing is in order in these communities.

Tags:

User generated content. If we don't own it, who get's paid?

Submitted by Richard (not verified) on Wed, 17/05/2006 - 12:09.
"No one pays the community for the content they generate." Not with money, no. But that does not mean those users who "generate content" aren't rewarded, either with exposure or establishing connections or having a good time, among many other reasons people participate in communities that don't involve getting paid. "Clearly compensation to the community participants is in order." Really? What if the community participants don't care, i.e. if it's a free-to-them and fun way to interact with people and create art, stories, movies, music etc. or even 'just' connections with others? What if the non-monetary benefit they get from a community site far outweighs a few dollars they might get from shared ad revenue? At first I thought you were joking, assuming you used the terms "user generated content" and "business model" and "driving ... traffic" sarcastically since they're all meaningless terms to most people (and rightly so). http://www.powazek.com/2006/04/000576.html Evidently not, though.

User generated content. If we don't own it, who get's paid?

Submitted by David on Wed, 17/05/2006 - 07:36.
Thanks Necrodome. I'll check out those sites. I think that is the way of the future. When I see some of the MySpace pages getting millions of views, I wonder if they content provider is actually getting compensated for any of the ads that are being served up.

User generated content. If we don't own it, who get's paid?

Submitted by necrodome (not verified) on Wed, 17/05/2006 - 05:34.
hafif.org and bildirgec.org are two main community sites with user generated content (which is mainly text). there is a revenue generated from Google Adsense. site owners keep the %30, and the %70 is splitted among contributers according to how much their article is read.