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User generated content in the virtual world Second Life

User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by

users Ancient Egyptian roles * User (ancient Egyptian official), an ancient Egyptian nomarch (governor) of the Eighth Dynasty * Useramen, an ancient Egyptian vizier also called "User" Other uses * User (computing) A user is a person who ...

on online platforms such as

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

, discussion forums and

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

s. It is a product consumers create to disseminate information about online products or the firms that market them. User-generated content is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, entertainment, customer engagement, advertising, gossip, research and many more. It is an example of the democratization of content production and the

flattening Flattening is a measure of the compression of a circle or sphere along a diameter to form an ellipse or an ellipsoid of revolution ( spheroid) respectively. Other terms used are ellipticity, or oblateness. The usual notation for flattening i ...

of traditional media hierarchies. The

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

adopted a user-generated content platform for its websites in 2005, and

TIME Magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on Ma ...

named "You" as the Person of the Year in 2006, referring to the rise in the production of UGC on

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

platforms.

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

also developed a similar user-generated content platform, known as iReport. There are other examples of news channels implementing similar protocols, especially in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe or terrorist attack. Social media users can provide key eyewitness content and information that may otherwise have been inaccessible. By 2020 businesses are increasingly leveraging User Generated Content to promote their products, as it is seen as a cost effective and authentic way to grow a brand's image and sales. Due to new media and

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...

affordances, such as low cost and low barriers to entry, the Internet is an easy platform to create and dispense user-generated content, allowing the dissemination of information at a rapid pace in the wake of an event.

Definition

The advent of user-generated content marked a shift among media organizations from creating online content to providing facilities for amateurs to publish their own content. User-generated content has also been characterized as citizen media as opposed to the "packaged goods media" of the past century. Citizen Media is audience-generated feedback and news coverage. People give their reviews and share stories in the form of user-generated and user-uploaded audio and user-generated video. The former is a two-way process in contrast to the one-way distribution of the latter. Conversational or two-way media is a key characteristic of so-called

which encourages the publishing of one's own content and commenting on other people's content. The role of the passive audience, therefore, has shifted since the birth of

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

, and an ever-growing number of participatory users are taking advantage of the interactive opportunities, especially on the Internet to create independent content. Grassroots experimentation then generated an innovation in sounds, artists, techniques, and associations with audiences which then are being used in mainstream media. The active, participatory and creative audience is prevailing today with relatively accessible media, tools, and applications, and its culture is in turn affecting mass media corporations and global audiences. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined three central schools for UGC: # Publication requirement: While user-generated content (UGC) could be made by a user and never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people (e.g., fellow university students). This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way instant messages, and the like. # Creative effort: Creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites that users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered UGC. However, uploading photographs, expressing one's thoughts in a blog post or creating a new music video could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context. # Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User-generated content is generally created outside of professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself. It is important to have an objective before attempting to become part of the UGC/social networking environment. For example, companies may ask users to post their reviews directly to their Facebook page. This could end up disastrous if a user makes a comment that steers people away from the product. Mere copy & paste or hyperlinking could also be seen as user-generated self-expression. The action of linking to a work or copying a work could in itself motivate the creator, express the taste of the person linking or copying. Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, and leaptag.com are good examples of where such linkage to work happens. The culmination of such linkages could very well identify the tastes of a person in the community and make that person unique. User-generated content occurs when a product's customers create and disseminate online ideas about a product or the firm that markets it. These ideas are often in the form of text but also come in other forms such as music, photos, or videos. UGC has three key characteristics: (1) The contribution is by users of a product rather than the firm that sells this product; (2) it is creative in nature and the user adds something new; (3) it is posted online and generally accessible.

Media pluralism

According to

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

, in 2016 an average of 96,000

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

s was transferred monthly over the Internet, more than twice as many as in 2012. In 2016, the number of active websites surpassed 1 billion, up from approximately 700 million in 2012. This means the content we currently have access to is more diverse than ever before. Reaching 1.66 billion daily active users in Q4 2019,

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

has emerged as the most popular social media platform globally. Other social media platforms are also dominant at the regional level such as:

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

in Japan, Naver in the

Republic of Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its ea ...

, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

(owned by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

) in

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

VKontakte VK (short for its original name ''VKontakte''; russian: ВКонтакте, meaning ''InContact'') is a Russian online social media and social networking service based in Saint Petersburg. VK is available in multiple languages but it is predomin ...

(VK) and

Odnoklassniki Odnoklassniki ( rus, Одноклассники, t=Classmates) is a social network service used mainly in Russia and former Soviet Republics. The site was developed by Albert Popkov and launched on March 4, 2006. The website currently has more ...

(eng. ''Classmates'') in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...

and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe,

WeChat WeChat () is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has b ...

and QQ in China. However, a concentration phenomenon is occurring globally giving the dominance to a few online platforms that become popular for some unique features they provide, most commonly for the added privacy they offer users through disappearing messages or

end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecommunications service providers, telecom providers, Internet ...

(e.g.

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ...

, Snapchat,

Signal In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The '' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing' ...

, and

Telegram Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

), but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences. Production of freely accessible information has been increasing since 2012. In January 2017,

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

had more than 43 million articles, almost twice as many as in January 2012. This corresponded to a progressive diversification of content and increase in contributions in languages other than English. In 2017, less than 12 percent of Wikipedia content was in English, down from 18 percent in 2012. Graham, Straumann, and Hogan say that increase in the availability and diversity of content has not radically changed the structures and processes for the production of knowledge. For example, while content on Africa has dramatically increased, a significant portion of this content has continued to be produced by contributors operating from North America and Europe, rather than from Africa itself.

History

The massive, multi-volume ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a co ...

'' was exclusively composed of user-generated content. In 1857,

Richard Chenevix Trench Richard Chenevix Trench (Richard Trench until 1873; 9 September 1807 – 28 March 1886) was an Anglican archbishop and poet. Life He was born in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Richard Trench (1774–1860), barrister-at-law, and the Dublin wri ...

of the London Philological Society sought public contributions throughout the English-speaking world for the creation of the first edition of the ''OED''. As Simon Winchester recounts:

So what we're going to do, if I have your agreement that we're going to produce such a dictionary, is that we're going to send out invitations, were going to send these invitations to every library, every school, every university, every book shop that we can identify throughout the English-speaking world... everywhere where English is spoken or read with any degree of enthusiasm, people will be invited to contribute words. And the point is, the way they do it, the way they will be asked and instructed to do it, is to read voraciously and whenever they see a word, whether it's a preposition or a sesquipedalian monster, they are to... if it interests them and if where they read it, they see it in a sentence that illustrates the way that that word is used, offers the meaning of the day to that word, then they are to write it on a slip of paper... the top left-hand side you write the word, the chosen word, the catchword, which in this case is 'twilight'. Then the quotation, the quotation illustrates the meaning of the word. And underneath it, the citation, where it came from, whether it was printed or whether it was in manuscript... and then the reference, the volume, the page and so on... and send these slips of paper, these slips are the key to the making of this dictionary, into the headquarters of the dictionary.

In the following decades, hundreds of thousands of contributions were sent to the editors. In the 1990s several electronic

bulletin board systems A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such a ...

were based on user-generated content. Some of these systems have been converted into websites, including the film information site

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

which started as ''rec.arts.movies'' in 1990. With the growth of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

the focus moved to websites, several of which were based on user-generated content, including Wikipedia (2001) and

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

(2004). User-generated

Internet video Internet video (online video / cloud-based video) is the general field that deals with the transmission of digital video over the internet. Internet video exists in several formats, the most notable being MPEG-4i AVC, AVCHD, FLV, and MP3. There ...

was popularized by

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...

, an online video platform founded by Chad Hurley,

Jawed Karim Jawed Karim (বাংলাঃ জাওয়াদ করিম) (born October 28, 1979) is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi and German descent. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to up ...

and Steve Chen in April 2005. It enabled the

video streaming Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of o ...

MPEG-4 AVC Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

(H.264) user-generated content from anywhere on the

. The

...
set up a pilot user-generated content team in April 2005 with 3 staff. In the wake of the

7 July 2005 London bombings The 7 July 2005 London bombings, often referred to as 7/7, were a series of four coordinated suicide attacks carried out by Islamic terrorists in London that targeted commuters travelling on the city's public transport system during the mo ...

and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the team was made permanent and was expanded, reflecting the arrival in the mainstream of the citizen journalist. After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. The BBC does not normally pay for content generated by its viewers. In 2006

launched

CNN iReport iReport was CNN's citizen journalism initiative that allowed people from around the globe to contribute pictures and video of breaking news stories. It was similar to Wikinews in that it allowed, and encouraged, ordinary citizens to submit sto ...

, a project designed to bring user-generated news content to CNN. Its rival Fox News Channel launched its project to bring in user-generated news, similarly titled "uReport". This was typical of major television news organizations in 2005–2006, who realized, particularly in the wake of the London 7 July bombings, that

citizen journalism Citizen journalism, also known as collaborative media, participatory journalism, democratic journalism, guerrilla journalism or street journalism, is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, a ...

could now become a significant part of broadcast news. Sky News, for example, regularly solicits for photographs and video from its viewers. User-generated content was featured in ''Time'' magazine's 2006 Person of the Year, in which the person of the year was "you", meaning all of the people who contribute to user-generated media, including YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace. A precursor to user-generated content uploaded on YouTube was ''

America's Funniest Home Videos ''America's Funniest Home Videos'', also called ''America's Funniest Videos'' (abbreviated as ''AFV''), is an American video clip television series on ABC, based on the Japanese variety show ''Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan''. The show featur ...

''.

Motivation for creating UGC

The benefits derived from user-generated content for the content host are clear, these include a low-cost promotion, positive impact on product sales, and fresh content. However, the benefit to the contributor is less direct. There are various theories behind the motivation for contributing user-generated content, ranging from altruistic, to social, to materialistic. Due to the high value of user-generated content, many sites use incentives to encourage their generation. These incentives can be generally categorized into implicit incentives and explicit incentives. Sometimes, users are also given monetary incentives to encourage them to create captivating and inspiring UGC.Toluna: # Implicit incentives: These incentives are not based on anything tangible. Social incentives are the most common form of implicit incentives. These incentives allow the user to feel good as an active member of the community. These can include the relationship between users, such as

's friends, or

's followers. Social incentives also include the ability to connect users with others, as seen on the sites already mentioned as well as sites like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, which allow users to share media from their lives with others. Users also share the experiences that they have while using a particular product/service. This will improve the customer experience as they can make informed decisions in buying a product, which makes them smart buyers. Other common social incentives are status, badges, or levels within the site, something a user earns when they reach a certain level of participation which may or may not come with additional privileges.

Yahoo! Answers Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were org ...

is an example of this type of social incentive. Another social incentive is social comparison. Being aware of the user's own ranking or level among the whole community could affect the behavior as well. Social incentives cost the host site very little and can catalyze vital growth; however, their very nature requires a sizable existing community before it can function. Social incentive can also be split into identification and integration. The identification motivation has strong external standardization and internalization of behavioral goals, such as social identity, that is, users will follow some subjective norms and images to constrain and practice their behaviors. The integration has the strongest external standardization and goal internalization, and the agent often integrates its actual actions with the subjective norms of the environment, so it has the effect of self-restraint and self-realization, such as the sense of belonging. Naver Knowledge-iN is another example of this type of social incentive. It uses a point system to encourage users to answer more questions by receiving points. # Explicit incentives: These incentives refer to tangible rewards. Explicit incentives can be split into externality and projection. External motivation is more inclined to economic and material incentives, such as the reward for engaging in a task, which has little internalization and lacks relevant external norms and constraints. Examples include financial payment, entry into a contest, a voucher, a coupon, or frequent traveler miles. Direct explicit incentives are easily understandable by most and have immediate value regardless of the community size; sites such as the Canadian shopping platform Wishabi and Amazon Mechanical Turk both use this type of financial incentive in slightly different ways to encourage users participation. The projective agent has some external norms, but the degree of internalization is not enough, that is, it has not been fully recognized by the actor. The drawback to explicit incentives is that they may cause the user to be subject to the overjustification effect, eventually believing the only reason for participating is for the explicit incentive. This reduces the influence of the other form of social or altruistic motivation, making it increasingly costly for the content host to retain long-term contributors.HOPLA Online:

Ranking and assessment

The distribution of UGC across the Web provides a high volume data source that is accessible for

analysis Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...

, and offers utility in enhancing the experiences of end users.

Social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...

research can benefit from having access to the opinions of a population of users, and use this data to make inferences about their traits. Applications in

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of Data (computing), data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information te ...

seek to mine end user data to support and improve machine-based processes, such as information retrieval and recommendation. However, processing the high volumes of data offered by UGC necessitate the ability to automatically sort and filter these data points according to their value. Determining the value of user contributions for assessment and ranking can be difficult due to the variation in the quality and structure of this data. The quality and structure of the data provided by UGC is application-dependent, and can include items such as tags, reviews, or comments that may or may not be accompanied by useful metadata. Additionally, the value of this data depends on the specific task for which it will be utilized and the available features of the application domain. Value can ultimately be defined and assessed according to whether the application will provide service to a crowd of humans, a single end user, or a platform designer. The variation of data and specificity of value has resulted in various approaches and methods for assessing and ranking UGC. The performance of each method essentially depends on the features and metrics that are available for analysis. Consequently, it is critical to have an understanding of the task objective and its relation to how the data is collected, structured, and represented in order to choose the most appropriate approach to utilizing it. The methods of assessment and ranking can be categorized into two classes: human-centered and machine-centered. Methods emphasizing human-centered utility consider the ranking and assessment problem in terms of the users and their interactions with the system, whereas the machine-centered method considers the problem in terms of

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and computation. The various methods of assessment and ranking can be classified into one of four approaches: community-based, user-based, designer-based, and hybrid. * Community-based approaches rely on establishing ground truth based on the

wisdom of the crowd The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social infor ...

regarding the content of interest. The assessments provided by the community of end users is utilized to directly rank content within the system in human-centered methods. The machine-centered method applies these community judgments in training algorithms to automatically assess and rank UGC. * User-based approaches emphasize the differences between individual users so that ranking and assessment can interactively adapt or be personalized given the particular requirements of each user. The human-centered approach accentuates interactive interfaces where the user can define and redefine their preferences as their interests shift. On the other hand, machine-centered approaches model the individual user according to explicit and implicit knowledge that is gathered through system interactions. * Designer-based approaches primarily use machine-centered methods to essentially maximize the diversity of content presented to users in order to avoid constraining the space of topic selections or perspectives. The diversity of content can be assessed with respect to various dimensions, such as authorship, topics, sentiments, and named entities. * Hybrid approaches seek to combine methods from the various frameworks in order to develop a more robust approach for assessing and ranking UGC. Approaches are most often combined in one of two ways: the crowd-based approach is often used to identify

hyperlocal Hyperlocal is information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community. The term can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term (e.g. new ...

content for a user-based approach, or a user-based approach is used to maintain the intent of a designer-based approach. ;Key concepts: # contribution is by users of a product rather than the firm # creative in nature and adds something new # posted online and generally accessible.

Types

There are many types of user-generated content:

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

s, where people talk about different topics;

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

s are services where users can post about many topics, product reviews on a supplier website or in social media;

s such as

and

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

allow users, sometimes including anonymous users, to edit the content. Another type of user-generated content are social networking sites like

, Instagram,

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

, Snapchat,

Twitch Twitch may refer to: Biology * Muscle contraction ** Convulsion, rapid and repeated muscle contraction and relaxation ** Fasciculation, a small, local, involuntary muscle contraction ** Myoclonic twitch, a jerk usually caused by sudden muscle co ...

TikTok TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an international version o ...

or VK, where users interact with other people via chatting, writing messages, posting images or links, and sharing content. Media hosting sites such as

allow users to post content. Some forms of user-generated content, such as a social commentary blog, can be considered as a form of

Blogs

Blogs are websites created by individuals, groups, and associations. They mostly consist of journal-style text and enable interaction between a blogger and reader in the form of online comments. Self-hosted blogs can be created by professional entities such as entrepreneurs and small businesses. Blog hosting platforms include

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

Blogger A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

, and

Medium Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation *Medium bomber, a class of war plane *Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium of ...

;

Typepad Typepad is a blogging service owned by Endurance International Group, previously owned by SAY Media (from the merger of Six Apart Ltd and VideoEgg). Originally launched in October 2003, Typepad is based on Six Apart's Movable Type platform, and ...

is often used by media companies;

Weebly Weebly () is a web hosting service, headquartered in San Francisco. Weebly is a subsidiary of Block, Inc. History Weebly was founded in 2006 by Chief Executive Officer David Rusenko, Chief Technology Officer Chris Fanini, and former Chief Pr ...

is geared for

online shopping Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the ...

. Social networking blogging platforms include Tumblr,

LiveJournal LiveJournal (russian: Живой Журнал), stylised as LiVEJOURNAL, is a Russian-owned social networking service where users can keep a blog, journal, or diary. American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, a ...

, and Sina Weibo. Among the many blogs on the web,

Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twic ...

is a group blog with themes including

and

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

;

HuffPost ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...

blogs include opinions on subjects such as politics, entertainment, and technology. There are also travel blogs such as

Head for Points Head for Points is a British travel website covering discussion of airline frequent-flyer programs and hotel loyalty programs in the UK. It has been referenced by National Geographic, CNN and the BBC. The site has a predominantly UK-based re ...

, Adventurous Kate, and an early form of

The Points Guy The Points Guy (TPG) is an American travel website and blog that produces sponsored news and stories on travel, on means of accumulating and using airline points and miles, on politics and credit cards, and in particular credit card reviews ...

Websites

Entertainment social media and information sharing websites include

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

, 9Gag,

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

Upworthy Upworthy is a website dedicated to positive storytelling. It was started in March 2012 by Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn, and Peter Koechley, the former managing editor of ''The Onion''. One of Facebook's co-founders, Chris ...

and

Newgrounds Newgrounds is an entertainment website and company founded by Tom Fulp in 1995. It hosts user-generated content such as games, films, audio, and artwork. Fulp produces in-house content at the headquarters and offices in Glenside, Pennsylvania. ...

. Sites like 9Gag allow users to create memes and quick video clips. Sites like Tech in Asia and Buzzfeed engage readers with professional communities by posting articles with user-generated comment sections. Other websites include

fanfiction Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, setti ...

sites such as

FanFiction.Net FanFiction.Net (often abbreviated as FF.net or FFN) is an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded on October 15, 1998, by Los Angeles computer programmer Xing Li, who also runs the site. It has over 12 million registered users and hos ...

;

imageboard An imageboard is a type of Internet forum that focuses on the posting of images, often alongside text and discussion. The first imageboards were created in Japan as an extension of the textboard concept. These sites later inspired the creation of ...

s; artwork communities like

DeviantArt DeviantArt (historically stylized as deviantART) is an American online art community that features artwork, videography and photography, launched on August 7, 2000 by Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, and Matthew Stephens among others. DeviantArt, ...

; mobile photos and video sharing sites such as

Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by ...

and

; audio social networks such as

SoundCloud SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform and music sharing website that enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio. Founded in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud is one of the largest music streaming s ...

;

crowd funding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

or crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and

ArtistShare ArtistShare is the internet's first commercial crowdfunding website.Crowd-Funding 101: What Every Musician Needs for a Successful Campaign It also operates as a record label and business model for artists which enables them to fund their projec ...

; and customer

review site A review site is a website on which reviews can be posted about people, businesses, products, or services. These sites may use Web 2.0 techniques to gather reviews from site users or may employ professional writers to author reviews on the topic ...

s such as

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San F ...

. After launching in the mid-2000s, major UGC-based adult websites like

Pornhub Pornhub is a Canadian-owned internet pornography website. It is one of several pornographic video-streaming websites owned by MindGeek. , Pornhub is the 10th-most-trafficked website in the world and the second-most-trafficked adult website aft ...

YouPorn YouPorn is a free pornographic video sharing website and one of the 100 most accessed websites in the world. Since launching in August 2006, it grew to become one of the most popular pornographic website on the internet, and, in November 200 ...

and

xHamster xHamster is a Cypriot pornographic media and social networking site headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. xHamster serves user-submitted pornographic videos, webcam models, pornographic photographs, and erotic literature and incorporates social ...

and became the dominant mode of consumption and distribution of pornographic content on the internet. The appearance of pornographic content on sites like Wikipedia and Tumblr led moderators and site owners to institute stricter limits on uploads. The travel industry, in particular, has begun utilizing user-generated content to show authentic traveler experiences. Travel-related companies such as The Millennial, Gen Z, and Busabout relaunched their websites featuring UGC images and social content by their customers posted in real time. TripAdvisor includes reviews and recommendations by travelers about hotels, restaurants, and activities. The restaurant industry has also been altered by a review system the places more emphasis on online reviews and content from peers than traditional media reviews. In 2011

contained 70% of reviews for restaurants in the Seattle area compared to '' Food & Wine'' Magazine containing less than 5 percent.

Video games

Video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

s can have

fan-made Fan labor, also called fan works, are the creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups. These activities can include creation of written works (fiction, fan fiction and review literature), ...

content in the form of mods,

fan patch An unofficial patch is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alleviates bugs or shortcomings. Unofficial patches do ...

es, fan translations or

server emulator Strictly, a private server is any machine or virtual machine used as a server that is privately administrated. Colloquially the term is nearly-exclusively used to refer to independently operated, unofficial servers for video games. Private Server ...

s. Some games come with

level editor In video games, a level (also referred to as a map, stage, or round in some older games) is any space available to the player during the course of completion of an objective. Video game levels generally have progressively-increasing difficulty t ...

programs to aid in their creation. A few

massively multiplayer online game A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large number of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although there are ...

s including '' Star Trek Online'', '' Dota 2'', and ''

EverQuest 2 ''EverQuest II'' is a 3D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) originally developed and published by Sony Online Entertainment for Microsoft Windows PCs and released in November 2004. It is the sequel to the original ...

'' have UGC systems integrated into the game itself. A

metaverse In science fiction, the "metaverse" is a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets. In colloquial usa ...

can be a user-generated world, such as ''

Second Life ''Second Life'' is an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. Developed and owned by the San Fra ...

''. ''Second Life'' is a 3-D virtual world which provides its users with tools to modify the game world and participate in an economy, trading user content created via online creation for virtual currency.

Advertising

A popular use of UGC involves collaboration between a brand and a user. An example is the "Elf Yourself" videos by Jib Jab that come back every year around Christmas. The Jib Jab website lets people use their photos of friends and family that they have uploaded to make a holiday video to share across the internet. You cut and paste the faces of the people in the pictures to animated dancing elves. Some brands are also using UGC images to boost the performance of their paid social ads. For example, Toyota leveraged UGC for their "Feeling the Streets" Facebook ad campaign and were able to increase their total ad engagement by 440%.

Retailers

Some bargain hunting websites feature user-generated content, such as

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

, Dealsplus, and FatWallet which allow users to post, discuss, and control which bargains get promoted within the community. Because of the dependency of social interaction, these sites fall into the category of

social commerce Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media and online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services. More succinctly, social commerce ...

Educational

, a free encyclopedia, is one of the largest user-generated content databases in the world. Platforms such as

have frequently been used as an instructional aide. Organizations such as the

Khan Academy Khan Academy is an American non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Sal Khan. Its goal is creating a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short lessons in the form of videos. Its website also in ...

and the

Green brothers The Green brothers, John (born 1977) and Hank (born 1980), are two American entrepreneurs, social activists, authors, and YouTube vloggers. The two extensively work together, having started their collaborative popularity with a daily vlog proj ...

have used the platform to upload series of videos on topics such as math, science, and history to help aid viewers master or better understand the basics. Educational

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosin ...

s have also helped in teaching through an audio platform. Personal websites and messaging systems like Yahoo Messenger have also been used to transmit user-generated educational content. There have also been web forums where users give advice to each other. Students can also manipulate digital images or video clips to their advantage and tag them with easy to find keywords then share them to friends and family worldwide. The category of "student performance content" has risen in the form of discussion boards and chat logs. Students could write reflective journals and diaries that may help others. The websites SparkNotes and Shmoop are used to summarize and analyze books so that they are more accessible to the reader.

Photo sharing

Photo sharing Image sharing, or photo sharing, is the publishing or transfer of digital photos online. Image sharing websites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing and sharing of photos (publicly or privately). This function is provided through ...

websites are another popular form of UGC.

is a site in which users are able to upload personal photos they have taken and label them in regards to their "motivation". Flickr not only hosts images but makes them publicly available for reuse and reuse with modification. Instagram is a social media platform that allows users to edit, upload and include location information with photos they post. Panoramio.com and Flickr use metadata, such as GPS coordinates that allows for geographic placement of images.

Video sharing

Video sharing websites are another popular form of UGC.

and

allow users to create and upload videos.

Effect on journalism

The incorporation of user-generated content into mainstream

journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the " news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (pro ...

outlets is considered to have begun in 2005 with the

BBC's #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

creation of a user-generated content team, which was expanded and made permanent in the wake of the

. The incorporation of Web 2.0 technologies into news websites allowed user-generated content online to move from more social platforms such as MySpace,

, and personal blogs, into the mainstream of online journalism, in the form of comments on news articles written by professional journalists, but also through surveys, content sharing, and other forms of citizen journalism. Since the mid-2000s, journalists and publishers have had to consider the effects that user-generated content has had on how news gets published, read, and shared. A 2016 study on publisher business models suggests that readers of online news sources value articles written both by professional journalists, as well as users—provided that those users are experts in a field relevant to the content that they create. In response to this, it is suggested that online news sites must consider themselves not only a source for articles and other types of journalism but also a platform for engagement and feedback from their communities. The ongoing engagement with a news site that is possible due to the interactive nature of user-generated content is considered a source of sustainable revenue for publishers of online journalism going forward. Journalists are increasingly sourcing UGC from platforms, such as

and

, as news shifts to a digital space. This form of crowdsourcing can include using user content to support claims, using social media platforms to contact witnesses and obtain relevant images and videos for articles.

Use in marketing

The use of user-generated content has been prominent in the efforts of marketing online, especially among millennials. A good reason for this may be that 86% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support, and 60% believe user-generated content is not only the most authentic form of content, but also the most influential when making purchasing decisions. An increasing number of companies have been employing UGC techniques into their marketing efforts, such as Starbucks with their "White Cup Contest" campaign where customers competed to create the best doodle on their cups. The effectiveness of UGC in marketing has been shown to be significant as well. For instance, the "

Share a Coke Share a Coke is a multi-national marketing campaign of Coca-Cola. It debrands the traditional Coke logo, replacing "Coca-Cola" from one side of a bottle with the phrase "Share a Coke with" followed by a person's name. The campaign, which uses a l ...

" by

Coca-Cola Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlant ...

campaign in which customers uploaded images of themselves with bottles to social media attributed to a two percent increase in revenue. Of millennials, UGC can influence purchase decisions up to fifty-nine percent of the time, and eighty-four percent say that UGC on company websites has at least some influence on what they buy, typically in a positive way. As a whole, consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above those of professionals. User-generated content used in a marketing context has been known to help brands in numerous ways. * It encourages more engagement with its users, and doubles the likeliness that the content will be shared. * It builds trust with consumers. With a majority of consumers trusting UGC over brand provided information,"a person like me" as their most trusted source: UGC can allow for better brand-consumer relationships. * It provides SEO Value for brands. This in turn means more traffic is driven to the brands websites and that more content is linked back to the website. * It reassures purchase decisions which will keep customers shopping. With UGC, the conversion rate increases by as much as 4.6%. * It increases follower count on various social media platforms. * It helps integration with traditional marketing/promotional techniques which in turn drives more conversions for the companies. * It helps in increasing profit with significant reduction in costs for the company. * It typically low cost promotion since content given by free for firm's customers. User-generated Content Facts & Statistics * 86% of companies leverage UGC in their marketing techniques * 92% of potential customers seek reviews from existing customers * 64% of customers look for reviews, and ratings before they start their checkout process. * 90% of brands have seen an evident increase in their click-through rates using UGC in their ads. * Keeping your emails authentic and genuine can help increase the click-through rate by 73%. * 35% of Gen Z trusts UGC *74% increase is found in conversion rates simply because of UGC used in the product pages.

Opportunities

There are many opportunities in user-generated content. The advantage of UGC is that it is a quick, easy way to reach the masses. Here are some examples: * The companies could use social media for branding, and set up contests for the audience to submit their own creations. * The consumers and general audience members like to engage. Some have used a storytelling platform to both share and converse with others. * To raise awareness, whether it be for an organization, company, or event. *Reviews play a major role in a customers decision making. * Gain perspectives from members that one wouldn't otherwise get to engage with. * Personalization of the content put out; 71% of consumers like personalized ads. * Encouraging participation can be weakened by company claims to owning this content.

Criticism

The term "user-generated content" has received some criticism. The criticism to date has addressed issues of fairness, quality, privacy, the sustainable availability of creative work and effort among legal issues namely related to intellectual property rights such as copyrights etc. Some commentators assert that the term "user" implies an illusory or unproductive distinction between different kinds of "publishers", with the term "users" exclusively used to characterize publishers who operate on a much smaller scale than traditional mass-media outlets or who operate for free. Such classification is said to perpetuate an unfair distinction that some argue is diminishing because of the prevalence and affordability of the means of production and publication. A better response might be to offer optional expressions that better capture the spirit and nature of such work, such as EGC, Entrepreneurial Generated Content (see external reference below). Sometimes creative works made by individuals are lost because there are limited or no ways to precisely preserve creations when a UGC Web site service closes down. One example of such loss is the closing of the Disney

" VMK". VMK, like most games, has items that are traded from user to user. Many of these items are rare within the game. Users are able to use these items to create their own rooms, avatars and pin lanyard. This site shut down at 10 pm CDT on 21 May 2008. There are ways to preserve the essence, if not the entirety of such work through the users copying text and media to applications on their personal computers or recording live action or animated scenes using screen capture software, and then uploading elsewhere. Long before the Web, creative works were simply lost or went out of publication and disappeared from history unless individuals found ways to keep them in personal collections. Another criticized aspect is the vast array of user-generated product and service reviews that can at times be misleading for consumer on the web. A study conducted at Cornell University found that an estimated 1 to 6 percent of positive user-generated online hotel reviews are fake. Another concern of platforms that rely heavily on user-generated content, such as Twitter and Facebook, is how easy it is to find people who holds the same opinions and interests in addition to how well they facilitate the creation of networks or closed groups. While the strength of these services are that users can broaden their horizon by sharing their knowledge and connect with other people from around the world, these platforms also make it very easy to connect with only a restricted sample of people who holds similar opinions (see

Filter bubble A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolationTechnopediaDefinition – What does Filter Bubble mean?, Retrieved October 10, 2017, "....A filter bubble is the intellectual isolation, that can occur when websites make us ...

). There is also criticism regarding whether or not those who contribute to a platform should be paid for their content. In 2015, A group of 18 famous content creators on Vine attempted to negotiate a deal with Vine representatives to secure a $1.2 million contract for a guaranteed 12 videos a month. This negotiation was not successful.

Legal problems

The ability for services to accept user-generated content opens up a number of legal concerns, from the broader sense to specific local laws. In general, knowing who committed the online crime is difficult because many use pseudonyms or remain anonymous. Sometimes it can be traced back. But in the case of a public coffee shop, they have no way of pinpointing the exact user. There is also a problem with the issues surrounding extremely harmful but not legal acts. For example, the posting of content that instigates a person's suicide. It is a criminal offense if there is proof of "beyond reasonable doubt" but different situations may produce different outcomes. Depending on the country, there is certain laws that come with the Web 2.0. In the United States, the "

Section 230 Section 230 is a section of Title 47 of the United States Code that was enacted as part of the United States Communications Decency Act and generally provides immunity for website platforms with respect to third-party content. At its core, Sect ...

" exemptions of the Communications Decency Act state that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." This clause effectively provides a general immunity for websites that host user-generated content that is defamatory, deceptive or otherwise harmful, even if the operator knows that the third-party content is harmful and refuses to take it down. An exception to this general rule may exist if a website promises to take down the content and then fails to do so.

Copyright laws

Copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

laws also play a factor in relation to user-generated content, as users may use such services to upload works—particularly videos—that they do not have the sufficient rights to distribute. In many cases, the use of these materials may be covered by local "

fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...

" laws, especially if the use of the material submitted is transformative. Local laws also vary on who is liable for any resulting

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

s caused by user-generated content; in the United States, the

Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) is United States federal law that creates a conditional 'safe harbor' for online service providers (OSP) (a group which includes internet service providers (ISP) and other Inter ...

(OCILLA)—a portion of the

Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

(DMCA), dictates safe harbor provisions for "

online service provider An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, ...

s" as defined under the act, which grants immunity from

secondary liability Secondary liability, or indirect infringement, arises when a party materially contributes to, facilitates, induces, or is otherwise responsible for directly infringing acts carried out by another party. The US has statutorily codified secondary li ...

for the copyright-infringing actions of their users, as long as they promptly remove access to allegedly infringing materials upon the receipt of a notice from a copyright holder or registered agent, and they do not have actual knowledge that their service is being used for infringing activities. In the UK, the Defamation Act of 1996 says that if a person is not the author, editor or publisher and did not know about the situation, they are not convicted. Furthermore, ISPs are not considered authors, editors, or publishers and they cannot have responsibility for people they have no "effective control" over. Just like the DMCA, once the ISP learns about the content, they must delete it immediately. The European Union's approach is horizontal by nature, which means that civil and criminal liability issues are addressed under the

Electronic Commerce Directive The e-Commerce Directive, adopted in 2000, sets up an Internal Market framework for online services. Its aim is to remove obstacles to cross-border online services in the EU internal market and provide legal certainty for businesses and consumer ...

. Section 4 deals with liability of the ISP while conducting "mere conduit" services, caching and web hosting services.

Research

A study on YouTube analyzing one of the Video On Demand systems was conducted in 2007. The length of the video had decreased by two-fold from the non-UGC content but they saw a fast production rate. The user behavior is what perpetuates the UGC. The act of P2P (Peer-to-Peer) was studied and saw a great benefit to the system. They also studied the impact of content aliasing, sharing of multiple copies, and illegal uploads. A study from

York University York University (french: Université York), also known as YorkU or simply YU, is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's fourth-largest university, and it has approximately 55,700 students, 7,0 ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central C ...

in 2012 conducted research that resulted in a proposed framework for comparing brand-related UGC and to understand how the strategy used by a company could influence the brand sentiment across different social media channels including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The three scholars of this study examined two clothing brands, Lulu Lemon and American Apparel. The difference between these two brands is that Lulu Lemon had a social media following while American Apparel was the complete opposite with no social media following. Unsurprisingly, Lulu Lemon had much more positive contributions compared to American Apparel which had less positive contributions. Lulu Lemon has three times the number of positive contributions, 64 percent vs 22 percent for American Apparel on Twitter while on Facebook and YouTube, they had roughly an equal number of contributions. This proves that social media can influence how a brand is perceived, usually in a more positive light. A study by Dhar and Chang, published in 2007, found that the volume of blogs posted on a music album was positively correlated with future sales of that album.

General sources

Citations

External links

OECD study on the Participative Web: User Generated Content

��an overview of the UGC trend on the Web in 2006 * https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media {{DEFAULTSORT:User-Generated Content Collective intelligence Digital media New media Video game design