WildBlueSkies – Trends and strategies in Digital Media

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Community Is The New Content

Posted on November 25th, 2007 by dhirender

Time was, when Content was king with the focus on online marketing using content – an important consideration even in SEO. These days however, with engagement increasing in importance as a metric to measure the success of a website, and attention spans decreasing, pure content is unfortunately losing it’s shine while user generated content is basking in its fifteen minutes of fame.
The need today is to build great eCommerce websites that meet a number of users needs – a great user experience with the right amount of information and customer engagement that leads to conversion, and the route to that is more of consumer referrals, customer content, user ratings and reviews, etc. in short an environment that combines information with user feedback, engagement and communities centering around products interests.
Globally, the number of user-generated content creators is expected to reach 238 million in 2011, up from 137 million in 2007, while US user-generated content sites are expected to earn $4.3 billion in ad revenues in 2011, up from the expected $1 billion in 2007.
Does this mean that content is irrelevant? – pretty unlikely, but going forward even pure content websites would be advised to incorporate user generated features – take the new avtaar of USA Today for instance with its personalization features and opportunities for readers to interact, Google allowing reviews on Google News, or the trend towards citizen journalism.