User-generated content facts for kids

An example of user-generated content in the virtual world of Second Life

User-generated content (often called UGC) is any kind of content, like pictures, videos, sounds, text, or even software (such as video game mods), that people create and share online. You see it everywhere on social media, discussion forums, and wikis. It's basically content made by everyday users, not by big companies or professionals.

UGC is used for many things, like sharing news, entertainment, helping customers, advertising, and even research. It shows how content creation has become more open to everyone, not just traditional media companies. For example, the BBC started using UGC on its websites in 2005. In 2006, TIME Magazine even named "You" as the Person of the Year, celebrating the rise of UGC on Web 2.0 platforms. News channels like CNN also use UGC, especially during big events like disasters, where people can share eyewitness videos and information. Businesses now use UGC a lot to promote their products because it's often cheaper and feels more real to customers. Thanks to new technology, it's easy to create and share UGC quickly online.

What is User-Generated Content?

When user-generated content first appeared, media companies started focusing less on creating all the content themselves. Instead, they began providing ways for regular people to publish their own stuff. UGC is also known as "citizen media." This is different from the "packaged media" of the past, which was mostly one-way communication from big companies to audiences. Citizen media is when the audience creates feedback and news. People share their opinions and stories through videos or audio they make themselves. This two-way communication is a key part of Web 2.0, where everyone is encouraged to share their own content and comment on others' work.

This means that people who used to just watch or listen are now actively creating and sharing content. More and more users are taking advantage of these online tools to make their own independent content. This creativity from everyday people then influences mainstream media. Today, active and creative audiences are very common because media tools are easy to use. Their culture is even changing how big media companies and global audiences interact.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has three main ideas for what counts as UGC:

It Must Be Published

Even if someone creates content, it only counts as UGC if it's published somewhere online. This could be on a public website or a social media page that only a few friends can see. This rule helps us exclude things like private emails or instant messages.

It Needs Creative Effort

To be UGC, the content must show some creative effort. This means users have to add their own ideas or change existing works to make something new. For example, just copying a TV show clip and posting it online isn't UGC. But uploading your own photos, writing a blog post, or making a new music video would be. The amount of creative effort needed can depend on the situation.

Made Outside of Professional Work

User-generated content is usually made by people who aren't professionals doing it for their job. It often doesn't have a business goal or a commercial market. Most of the time, people create UGC without expecting to make money from it. They might do it to connect with friends, become well-known, or simply to express themselves.

Many Voices Online

The internet has grown a lot, with billions of active websites. This means there's more diverse and unique content available than ever before. Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms globally, with billions of users every day. Other platforms like Twitter in Japan, Instagram in Africa, and WeChat in China are also very popular in different regions.

However, a few big online platforms are becoming very dominant. They often become popular because they offer special features, like messages that disappear or secure end-to-end encryption (like WhatsApp or Telegram). These platforms often create smaller, more private communities.

The amount of free information online has also increased. For example, Wikipedia has grown to over 43 million articles. This means there's more content in different languages, not just English. While there's a lot more content about places like Africa, much of it is still written by people in North America and Europe, not by people in Africa itself.

A Brief History of UGC

User-generated content isn't a new idea! The huge Oxford English Dictionary was actually created using UGC. In 1857, a group called the London Philological Society asked people all over the English-speaking world to send in words and examples of how they were used. They asked people to read a lot, and whenever they saw an interesting word, they would write it down with a sentence showing its meaning and where they found it. Hundreds of thousands of these contributions were sent in over many years.

In the 1990s, early online communities called bulletin board systems were based on UGC. Some of these, like IMDb (a movie information site), later became websites. With the growth of the World Wide Web, more websites started using UGC, including Wikipedia (in 2001) and Flickr (in 2004).

YouTube made user-generated videos very popular. It was started in 2005 and allowed anyone to upload and share their own videos online. The BBC also started a team for UGC in 2005. After events like the 2005 London bombings, they saw how important it was for regular people to share news. For example, after an oil depot fire, the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers.

In 2006, CNN launched "CNN iReport" to get news content from users. Other news channels like Fox News Channel and Sky News did similar things, realizing that "citizen journalism" (news from regular people) was becoming a big part of broadcasting. Time magazine even recognized this in 2006 by naming "you" as the Person of the Year, celebrating everyone who contributes to UGC platforms like YouTube and Wikipedia.

Why People Create UGC

It's clear that UGC helps companies by giving them low-cost promotion and fresh content. But why do people create it? There are many reasons, from wanting to help others to social reasons or even getting something in return. Because UGC is so valuable, many websites offer incentives to encourage people to create it. These can be split into two main types:

Hidden Incentives

These are rewards that aren't physical or monetary. Social reasons are the most common. People feel good when they are active members of a community. This can include having "friends" on Facebook or "followers" on Twitter. Social incentives also let users connect with others by sharing media from their lives on sites like YouTube and Instagram. Users also share their experiences with products or services, which helps other customers make good choices.

Other hidden incentives include getting a special status, badges, or levels within a site. Users earn these when they participate a lot, and they might come with extra privileges. Yahoo! Answers is an example where users earn points for answering questions. Being able to compare your ranking with others in the community can also encourage more participation.

Clear Incentives

These are rewards that are real and tangible. They are often about money or material things. Examples include getting paid, entering a contest, receiving a voucher, a coupon, or frequent traveler miles. These direct incentives are easy to understand and have immediate value, no matter how big the online community is. Websites like Amazon Mechanical Turk use financial incentives to encourage users to participate.

However, there's a downside to clear incentives. Users might start to believe they are only participating for the reward. This can reduce their desire to contribute for social or helpful reasons, making it more expensive for the company to keep long-term contributors.

How UGC is Ranked and Used

The huge amount of UGC online provides a lot of data that can be analyzed. This data helps improve the experience for users. Social scientists can use this data to understand what people think. In technology, companies use this data to improve things like information retrieval (finding information) and recommendation systems (suggesting things you might like). But with so much data, it's important to automatically sort and filter it to find what's valuable.

Figuring out the value of user contributions can be tricky because the quality and structure of the data vary a lot. The value also depends on what you want to use the data for. Ultimately, value can be defined by whether the content helps many people, a single user, or a platform designer.

Because of these differences, many ways have been developed to assess and rank UGC. How well each method works depends on the information available for analysis. So, it's important to understand what you want to achieve and how the data is collected to choose the best approach. These methods can be grouped into two main types: human-focused and machine-focused. Human-focused methods look at how users interact with the system, while machine-focused methods use machine learning and computer calculations.

Here are four main approaches:

Community-based approaches use the opinions of many users to decide what's good. What the community thinks helps rank content directly.
User-based approaches focus on what each individual user likes. This means ranking and suggestions can change to fit what a specific user wants.
Designer-based approaches mainly use computers to make sure there's a wide variety of content for users. This helps avoid limiting what topics or viewpoints people see.
Hybrid approaches combine different methods to create a stronger way to assess and rank UGC. For example, they might use community opinions to find local content for a specific user.

Key ideas about UGC

It's made by users, not by the company.
It's creative and adds something new.
It's posted online and usually available for others to see.

Types of User-Generated Content

There are many different kinds of user-generated content:

Online forums are places where people discuss various topics.
Blogs are websites where users can post about many subjects, and readers can leave comments.
Product reviews are found on shopping websites or social media.
Wikis like Wikipedia allow users to edit content, sometimes even anonymously.
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok let users chat, write messages, post images, and share content with others.
Media hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo allow users to upload videos.
Some UGC, like a social commentary blog, can be a form of citizen journalism.

Blogs

Blogs are websites created by individuals or groups. They often look like online journals and allow the blogger and readers to interact through comments. Some blogs are hosted on platforms like WordPress or Medium, while others are part of social networks like Tumblr. Blogs cover a huge range of topics, from technology to travel.

Websites

Many entertainment and information-sharing websites rely on UGC. Sites like Reddit and 9gag let users create and share memes or short videos. Websites like Buzzfeed engage readers with articles that have user-generated comment sections. Other examples include fanfiction sites, artwork communities like DeviantArt, and photo/video sharing sites like Flickr. Crowd funding sites like Kickstarter and customer review sites like Yelp also use UGC.

The travel industry especially uses UGC to show real experiences from travelers. Companies like TripAdvisor feature reviews and recommendations from travelers about hotels, restaurants, and activities. The restaurant industry has also changed because online reviews from regular people are now more important than traditional media reviews.

Video Games

Video games often have fan-made content like mods, fan patches, or fan translations. Some games even come with tools to help players create their own levels. A few online games, like Star Trek Online and Dota 2, have UGC systems built right into the game. A metaverse can be a user-generated world, like Second Life, where users can create and trade their own content.

Advertising

A popular way to use UGC is when a brand works with a user. For example, the "Elf Yourself" videos by Jib Jab let people upload photos of friends and family to create fun holiday videos with animated dancing elves. Some brands also use UGC images in their paid ads on social media. For instance, Toyota used UGC for a Facebook ad campaign and saw a big increase in how much people engaged with their ads.

Retailers

Some websites that help you find good deals use user-generated content. Sites like eBay and Dealsplus let users post, discuss, and vote on which bargains get promoted. Because these sites rely on social interaction, they are part of "social commerce."

Educational Content

Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, is one of the biggest UGC databases in the world. Platforms like YouTube are often used for teaching. Organizations like the Khan Academy upload video series on subjects like math and science to help viewers learn. Educational podcasts also teach through audio. Personal websites and online forums are also used for sharing educational UGC, where users give each other advice. Students can also share their own study materials, like reflective journals or summaries of books on sites like SparkNotes.

Photo Sharing

Photo sharing websites are a very popular type of UGC. Flickr allows users to upload personal photos and label them. Flickr not only hosts images but also makes them available for others to use or change. Instagram is a social media platform where users can edit, upload, and share photos with location information. Early photo sharing sites like Webshots (1995) and SmugMug (2002) helped make this popular.

Video Sharing

Video sharing websites are another popular form of UGC. YouTube and TikTok allow users to create and upload their own videos.

How UGC Affects Journalism

User-generated content started becoming a big part of mainstream journalism around 2005, when the BBC created a UGC team. This team became permanent after the 2005 London bombings, showing how important it was for regular people to share news. New technologies allowed UGC to move from social platforms like MySpace and personal blogs into mainstream online journalism. This happened through comments on news articles, surveys, content sharing, and other forms of citizen journalism.

Since the mid-2000s, journalists have had to think about how UGC changes how news is published, read, and shared. Studies show that readers value articles written by both professional journalists and users, especially if those users are experts in the topic. This means online news sites need to be not just a source of articles, but also a place for communities to engage and give feedback. This ongoing engagement with a news site, made possible by UGC, is seen as a way for online journalism to make money in the future. Journalists are now often finding UGC on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to support their stories, contact witnesses, and get relevant images and videos for articles.

UGC in Marketing

User-generated content is very important in online marketing, especially for young people. A big reason for this is that most consumers say that being real is important when choosing brands. They also believe UGC is the most real and influential type of content when they decide what to buy.

More and more companies are using UGC in their marketing. For example, Starbucks had a "White Cup Contest" where customers drew on their coffee cups and shared the pictures. The "Share a Coke" campaign by Coca-Cola, where customers uploaded pictures of themselves with personalized bottles, helped increase their sales. For young adults, UGC can influence buying decisions a lot, and most say that UGC on company websites affects what they buy in a good way. Overall, customers trust recommendations and reviews from other customers more than from professionals.

UGC helps brands in many ways:

It encourages more interaction with users, making content twice as likely to be shared.
It builds trust with customers. Since most customers trust UGC more than brand information, it creates better relationships.
It helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), meaning more people find the brand's website.
It helps customers feel confident about their purchases, which keeps them shopping. UGC can increase sales by a lot.
It helps brands get more followers on social media.
It works well with traditional marketing, leading to more sales.
It helps increase profits while significantly lowering costs for the company.
It's often a low-cost way to promote because customers provide the content for free.

Some facts about User-Generated Content:

86% of companies use UGC in their marketing.
92% of potential customers look for reviews from existing customers.
64% of customers check reviews and ratings before buying something.
90% of brands have seen more clicks on their ads when using UGC.
Making emails feel real can increase clicks by 73%.
74% increase in sales can happen just by using UGC on product pages.

Opportunities with UGC

There are many exciting opportunities with user-generated content. A big advantage of UGC is that it's a fast and easy way to reach many people. Here are some examples:

Companies can use social media for branding and set up contests for people to submit their own creations.
Customers and audiences love to get involved. Some use storytelling platforms to share and talk with others.
UGC can raise awareness for an organization, company, or event.
Reviews from customers play a huge role in what other customers decide to buy.
You can get ideas and viewpoints from people you might not otherwise connect with.
Content can be personalized; many consumers like personalized ads.

Research on UGC

A study on YouTube in 2007 looked at how videos were watched. It found that user-generated videos were shorter than professional ones but were produced very quickly. The way users behaved kept the UGC flowing. Another study looked at how people share content directly with each other (peer-to-peer) and found it very helpful for the system.

A 2012 study from York University looked at how companies' social media strategies affected how people felt about their brands. They compared two clothing brands, Lulu Lemon and American Apparel. Lulu Lemon had a strong social media presence, while American Apparel did not. Not surprisingly, Lulu Lemon had many more positive comments on social media. This shows that social media can really change how a brand is seen, usually in a positive way. Another study in 2007 found that the number of blog posts about a music album was linked to how many copies of that album would be sold later.