Just read some funny (because it’s true) stuff coming from the Brian Oberkirch camp in regard to user-generated content. Even though we have an entire generation of sites and services to look back on, the world still forgets that content, in and of itself, doesn’t create value. As Brian puts it…
What is interesting about blogs, podcasts, reviews and online video is not that they exist, but that you can find them in a timely, meaningful way.
A few of my Web 1.0 years were spent managing the digital end of a publishing outfit, AKA a Gannett newspaper. The word at the time was that content was king. Bits of it (content) were fed to the web to lure unsuspecting DINKs into the ad gauntlet. It was a beautiful model: create content, build readership, charge advertisers.
A fly got in the teleporter, though, and the model didn’t play out. Newspapers tried to control access to their content and ended up getting stuck on the first step. Readers got frustrated, distracted, and picked off. In short, content wasn’t enough.
Fast forward to today. There’s a new model, and it has a spin: let your users create content. Guess what, content still isn’t enough.
Contrary to popular sway, letting others put stuff on the web for you doesn’t change the game. Letting them carve, chunk, consume, contradict, rate, subscribe to, forward, syndicate, desecrate, aggregate, (etc) your stuff is how you mix it up, so to speak.
It’s the experience that engages attention and builds community. Not [just] the content.
If you’re looking for proof that the content is king model [alone] doesn’t play well, Gannett’s 5-yr stock performance ought to do it. Summary: it goes down.