I thought I was wrong about UGC, but perhaps not. Back in the 90’s when I was in the PC industry (Gateway, AST, Tandy), I was involved with developing & licensing applications that came bundled with the PC. I was frequently approached by a variety of companies that offered tools for creating your own movies, scrapbooks, etc. Evaluating that market I had found that while many consumers would like to pursue those activities, in reality few people ever used those applications.
Then came web 2.0, social networks, and user-generated content. Suddenly, it seemed, people were building their home pages with Xanga, Facebook, and MySpace; posting pictures into Flickr and movies in YouTube. It seemed like something had changed.. that this current generation actually *did* participate in “creative” activities.
So it was a bit of a surprise to read this from Mobile Content World in mocoNews:
usage research on sites like YouTube and Wikipedia [shows] that one percent of users uploaded content, 10 percent commented and 90 percent were happy to just watch
Perhaps people have not changed as much as I thought.
A couple of years ago, I noticed that my kids & their friends had moved from Xanga to Facebook. I asked them why and they gave me two reasons. First, Facebook gave them greater exclusivity — they could have better control over who interacted with their page. Second, you could be lazier with Facebook — most of the content on your page was actually created by other people vs. the home-page metaphor of Xanga (and Geocities before that).
As reported in mocoNews, Kristan Rivers, general manager of Player X China says that their content is 60 percent made-for-mobile content:
If it’s not exclusive they’ll go to the web
Unfortunately, the article does not elaborate on why — it could simply be that its cheaper to access that content on the web (a constraint that could change) or it could be that the web (PC) user experience is better (a constraint unlikely to change). But Charles Golvin, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, has this to say on the subject:
The experience of content on your phone is worse than almost any other venue you could think of. If you have a choice between a phone and any other outlet for content, you’ll almost always choose the other outlet because it’s a better experience. The phone is the device of last resort.
These indicators should sound warning bells to those looking for UGC as the next great thing in mobile. Three factors appear to be working against this idea:
- cost of mobile data is too expensive for the target demographic
- most consumers are consumers, not creators
- unless its exclusive, consumers will use the web
This bodes well for companies like GoTV Networks and Fun Little Movies, both creators and publishers of original mobile content.
