UGC isn’t worth the cost of storage.
Sarah Lacy has written an article over at TechCrunch about how user generated content is going to be abandoned by the internet community in the near future. This more or less is in line with my long standing belief that the only content worth having is unique and valuable. Youtube, for instance has some videos uploaded by users which are entirely unique and become succesful in terms of page hits. However, most of the utility gained by the average Youtube user, is listening to music or watching funny tv show clips or news clips. This content is generated by professionals in some sense and can be considered valuable with or without youtube.
Facebook’s content is somewhat valuable because it relates directly to yourself. Twitter also succeeds somewhat in this way. You can choose what content you gain utility from. But consider what percentage of Twitter’s content is monetizable. Those users with few followers won’t generate much in add revenue. If only 5-10% of Twitter users could be a profitable resource, can enough money be generated to support the other ~95%?
Expect most of the web to move to other sources of revenue than advertising on user generated content. Much insight into generating revenue will be gained by the shift by newspapers to purely digital content sources.
Update:
Youtube has now added adsense to professionally created videos from 600 content partners. Read
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