{"id":1944,"date":"2007-11-20T21:44:40","date_gmt":"2007-11-21T02:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/11\/20\/ugc-businessweek-misses-the-point\/"},"modified":"2007-11-20T21:44:40","modified_gmt":"2007-11-21T02:44:40","slug":"ugc-businessweek-misses-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/11\/20\/ugc-businessweek-misses-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"UGC: BusinessWeek misses the point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BusinessWeek magazine has a piece about user-generated content and how it&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/technology\/content\/nov2007\/tc20071119_701831.htm\">old and busted now<\/a> &#8212; people really want professional content, apparently. As proof that &#8220;one after another,&#8221; video sites are turning their backs on UGC and going steady with the pros instead, BusinessWeek gives us one example: Mania.tv, which recently refocused and got rid of the user-generated part of its model, which apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/10\/22\/maybe-people-dont-really-want-ugc\/\">never really drew<\/a> that many viewers.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, it&#8217;s possible that Mania either didn&#8217;t approach that part of its business properly, or didn&#8217;t bother looking for the diamonds in the UGC rough &#8212; or maybe people were too busy uploading their stuff to YouTube and DailyMotion and Metacafe. It&#8217;s tough being third or fourth to the party, as a number of commenters have pointed out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lostremote.com\/2007\/11\/20\/the-web-video-amateur-hour-may-be-ending\/\">on Lost Remote<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The thing that really bugs me about the BusinessWeek article is that there&#8217;s this false dichotomy between high-quality professional content and low-quality UGC crap. It&#8217;s not that binary, I would argue. It&#8217;s more like a spectrum, with professional content on one end, and as you move down the scale you get lower quality, until there&#8217;s your brother-in-law singing karaoke.<\/p>\n<p>Is there a lot of UGC crap that only someone&#8217;s mother would watch? Sure there is. But there&#8217;s a lot of garbage produced by &#8220;professionals&#8221; that gets foisted on people through traditional media too, whether they want it or not. I&#8217;d take some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reelpopblog.com\/2007\/11\/ugc-is-dead-pt.html\">half-decent UGC<\/a> over that any day.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BusinessWeek magazine has a piece about user-generated content and how it&#8217;s old and busted now &#8212; people really want professional content, apparently. As proof that &#8220;one after another,&#8221; video sites are turning their backs on UGC and going steady with the pros instead, BusinessWeek gives us one example: Mania.tv, which recently refocused and got rid &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/11\/20\/ugc-businessweek-misses-the-point\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;UGC: BusinessWeek misses the point&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}