Eye on Winer

There’s been an increasing amount of “anti-corporate” sentiment in the blogosphere lately. The push against “user-generated content” is just another off-shoot of the basic premise that corporations are bad news, man. The basic problems with the arguments made by the UGC freedom fighters can be nicely illustrated here:

We should be sharing more than kudos with the creative people and more than revenue too. That’s the next bubble that bursts, imho, it’ll soon be possible for people to set up their own server systems and route around the scams that get people to write stuff that’s worth $100 and get paid $10 (and often $0).

First, there is a vast difference between a business that uses User-Generated Content as its business model (Facebook, for example) and one that simply features UGC that isn’t portable (NetFlix). They are independent issues. Either can occur without the other, or they can happen together. I’m not going to bother with the openness issue.

The first issue is the (faulty) assumption that users get nothing. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Nobody saw an ad for Facebook and thought “That Zuckerberg kid is pretty good-looking. I think I’ll freely give of myself so that he might get rich.” Most people joined because “Hey! All of my friends are on Facebook — this will be cool!” That should be all the evidence needed that the content isn’t being given for free. In return for your data, you get to be a part of a community. You get the Facebook service. Which, for all of their current users, has a greater subjective value than that of their personal data. Their “content”. So the argument that the users get nothing is stopped before it even begins. It simply wouldn’t happen if that were the case.

The second, and more important, problem with Dave’s UGC argument has to do with this line: “it’ll soon be possible for people to set up their own server systems and route around the scams that get people to write stuff that’s worth $100 and get paid $10 (and often $0).” This is, technically, true. But…

The question I have to ask, though, is if Dave really thinks the value of this content is inherent in the content itself. I don’t believe it is. Facebook is supposedly worth $1 billion. They have around 10 million users. That means the average user profile could be argued to be, like Dave’s rhetorical hypo, worth $100. Ignoring the value of the Facebook service itself, Facebook pays its users nothing.

Is one profile, alone, though actually worth $100? If I setup my own server to store all of the data that I currently have on Facebook, could I sell it for $100? $50? $10? Odds are that you couldn’t get a penny for it. One user’s data, alone, is worth virtually nothing. It only becomes valuable when those profiles come together in large quantities.

Take the content and distribute it to millions of individual sites you end up with something like blogging. An entity that seems to only make serious money when it is either a) centered around spamming adsense or b) a collective of a number of popular bloggers (which is just a throwback to the big “problem” that Dave is trying to solve).

The cumulative value of the user-generated content is far greater than just the sum of the individual pieces, and that value is destroyed when the content is splintered off to dozens or hundreds of different content-islands.

Tags: UGC

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Dave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.