User-generated content

[1][4][5] User-generated content is used for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, entertainment, customer engagement, advertising, gossip, research and many more.

UGC has proven to be an effective method for brands to connect with consumers, drawing their attention through the sharing of experiences and information on social media platforms.

The role of the passive audience, therefore, has shifted since the birth of new media, and an ever-growing number of participatory users are taking advantage of these interactive opportunities, especially on the Internet, to create independent content.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined three core variables for UGC:[20][21] According to Cisco, in 2016 an average of 96,000 petabytes was transferred monthly over the Internet, more than twice as many as in 2012.

[citation needed] However, a concentration phenomenon is occurring globally giving 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 (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat, Signal, and Telegram), but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences.

[27] Graham, Straumann, and Hogan say that the increase in the availability and diversity of content has not radically changed the structures and processes for the production of knowledge.

In 1857, Richard Chenevix Trench of the London Philological Society sought public contributions throughout the English-speaking world for the creation of the first edition of the OED.

In the wake of the 7 July 2005 London bombings and the Buncefield oil depot fire, the team was made permanent and was expanded, reflecting the arrival in the mainstream of the citizen journalist.

[32] The distribution of UGC across the Web provides a high volume data source that is accessible for analysis, and offers utility in enhancing the experiences of end users.

Blog hosting platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Medium; Typepad is often used by media companies; Weebly is geared for online shopping.

After launching in the mid-2000s, major UGC-based adult websites like Pornhub, YouPorn and xHamster and became the dominant mode of consumption and distribution of pornographic content on the internet.

Travel-related companies such as The Millennial, Gen Z,[citation needed] and Busabout[44] relaunched their websites featuring UGC images and social content by their customers posted in real time.

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.

Organizations such as the Khan Academy and the Green brothers 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.

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.

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

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.

[68] 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.

For instance, the "Share a Coke" by Coca-Cola campaign in which customers uploaded images of themselves with bottles to social media attributed to a two percent increase in revenue.

Their role is to influence their followers' purchasing decisions, and their content is usually more polished and aligns closely with the branding and messaging of the companies they work with.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

[85] 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.

The ability for services to accept user-generated content opens up a number of legal concerns, from the broader sense to specific local laws.

[89] The European Union's approach is horizontal by nature, which means that civil and criminal liability issues are addressed under the Electronic Commerce Directive.

[95] A study from York University in Ontario 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.