Users help to build media's digital future

even the old guard of new media, scrambling to catch up.

Some are throwing down weighty cheques (News Corporation for MySpace,
ITV for Friends Reunited, Yahoo! for Flickr and Sony Pictures for
Grouper); others are launching diverse "Web 2.0"-style services of their
own (Trouble's Homegrown site; The Guardian's Comment Is Free blogging
initiative); still others are striking deals with hot UGC brands in need
of commercial back-up (Google's search advertising deal with News Corp,
Blinkx's alliance with Lycos).

The public may have hijacked the content-creation business, but for
media watchers the evolving self-image of many of the industry's most
established players is almost as striking.

"Many of our members are looking at themselves less as content creators
and more as creators of communities, or companies which leverage the
communities which exist around their content," says Alex White, director
of the Association of Online Publishers. "There are probably some that
are still a bit sceptical, but by now they are certainly in the
minority."

Gavin Newman, producer of video-sharing site Trouble Homegrown, one of a
number of UGC initiatives to spring from the traditional media world in
recent months, offers evidence of a similar shift in the broadcast
sector. "We just came back from (the International Television Festival
in) Edinburgh and there wasn't a broadcaster who wasn't talking about
UGC," he says.

Ironically, UGC, facilitated by mobile phones, digital cameras and
broadband access, has achieved its current momentum partly because of
the vacuum where many once hoped big-budget, fully-licensed film, music
and broadcast content would be.

"When people started to realise the internet was fast enough for video,
the expectation was that the big companies would put their content
online and we would all be able to watch it," says Suranga
Chandratillake, chief technical officer of video search engine
Blinkx.

"The thing that took us by surprise was UGC. The fact that it is so
popular demonstrates the pent-up demand for this kind of thing online,
and this in turn has triggered either panic or interest at traditional
media companies, because if they don't get involved, this stuff is just
going to take over."

Traditional players

Speaking in April, BBC chief executive Mark Thompson made clear his
belief that a failure to weave UGC through the Corporation's online
platform would rapidly render it "irrelevant" in today's media world.
Last year, Rupert Murdoch had an epiphany of similar proportions which
left the founders of MySpace $580m better off - a sum which
astonished many, but which sits happily against the $900m Google
will reportedly pay News Corp to provide search ads on the site.

At a more local level, moves by both Trouble and MTV, with its Flux
channel, to incorporate online material into above-the-line broadcasting
as rapidly as possible, demonstrate the prevailing view that UGC is not
simply a bit of online fun. MTV promises to "reinvent music television"
with Flux, which allows users to create a homepage to which they can
upload clips, music and pictures, the best of which will populate the TV
channel, which arrived earlier this month. Trouble Homegrown was
launched in May, also to harvest UGC, a proportion of which is then
repurposed as short stings for Trouble itself. The specific long-term
business model is not yet set in stone, says Newman, but it will likely
see advertisers and sponsors urging viewers of the channel and users of
the site to engage and create clips which reflect a given brand.

"There are going to be a lot of opportunities for users to engage with
brands, whether that means creating spoof trailers or movies, or whether
it is to create alternative pop videos for bands," he says.

The random, unpredictable nature of many "me media" sites can still act
as a deterrent for large corporate brands, and Newman says a sense of
humour is an important requirement for those seeking to make the most of
the opportunity Trouble Homegrown offers.

"We are only going to work with people who are going to understand and
get what we do," he says. "The ability to make fun of yourself is going
to be one of the key things and I think users will be able to engage
much better with brands which can do that."

In late August, YouTube put some flesh on the bones of its own pitch to
advertisers with the announcement of two key properties. The
Participatory Video Ad (PVA) is "a user-initiated video advertisement
which allows consumers to rate, share and critique favourite
advertising". The self-explanatory Brand Channel package allows
advertisers to "own" an area of YouTube where they can show branded
video content.

MySpace and Bebo favour similar propositions, leading some to wonder
just when the leading pack of social networking sites will begin to
diverge. But according to Heather Hopkins, Hitwise director of research,
they don't necessarily have to.

"The thing that's interesting is that it's not a zero-sum game," says
Hopkins, who regularly blogs about social networking sites and the
tussle between MySpace and Bebo for pole position in the UK.

"We see a lot of traffic moving among social networking sites, and what
they are fighting for is a greater share of the attention, not
necessarily exclusive users."

Nonetheless, the competition between the leading sites is palpable as
they vie to offer the strongest user proposition and the best media
case. Jim Scheinman, Bebo's VP of business development and sales, is
convinced that Bebo has what the ad world wants. "Our demographics are
13 to 30 and especially that very hard-to-reach 15 to 24-year-old
crowd," he says. "They are watching an hour or two less of television
every week and spending the time specifically on social networking
sites."

Though Bebo and similar sites offer the usual banners and skyscrapers,
the general belief is that such properties are both hard for social
networking sites to pull off and also something of a waste of their Web
2.0 potential.

"Traditional display placements tend to be next to the kind of content
that most advertisers really don't want to be next to," says Matt
Simpson, Starcom head of digital. "An awful lot of these social
networking sites appear at first glance to be a bit like dating sites
for young people and there is caution among clients and agencies about
advertising on them."

Branded channels

Scheinman assures us that such traditional web advertising generates
considerable revenue for Bebo, but he says the key pillar of the
company's offering moving forward will indeed be properties which
capitalise on the site's strength as a community-builder, such as
dedicated brand channels. Recent examples include a campaign for Sony
Pictures' movie Cars, which resulted in half a million views of the
trailer in a month. The dedicated Cars page was adopted by 6,000
"Beboers" as their own home page during the promotion.

"That sort of promotion is definitely our bread and butter," Scheinman
says. "It is online advertising, but I call it 'branded advertising
2.0'. Advertising 1.0 is the stuff you could buy on the old portals -
the banners and skyscrapers. But you can't do engagement marketing
without an engaged community. Yahoo! and MSN can't do what we are
doing."

While pure social networking sites wrestle with the challenges of
introducing commercial models without alienating the users who make the
platform valuable, others have started out with a brand-focused
proposition from the start.

Pigsback.com positions itself as "an online club of consumers and
brands" and has collected 350,000 users - 60% of them female - since its
UK launch in June 2005. Carrying a combination of brand offers and
lifestyle content, the Irish-based site makes no bones about its
commercial aims.

"I think we are probably one of the few sites that can say it has a
strong community element combined with a very strong revenue model that
sits alongside it," says Pigsback marketing director Jo Malvern.

Kellogg's, eBay, Ford and GlaxoSmithKline are among the brand owners to
have used Pigsback for interactive promotions. For a Special K campaign,
Pigsback invited its members to keep an online diary as they followed
the brand's two-week diet. "All you have to do is ask them and it is
amazing what people will do," says Malvern. "People are more likely to
trust what they are being told by other people than what they are being
told by the people who own the website or the brand."

If social networking sites walk a fine line between the sensibilities of
users and the interests of potential advertisers, then blogs, with their
outsider status and cult appeal, arguably face an even tougher job in
attempting to monetise their efforts.

Blogwatcher Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog in late July and
reports that new blogs are being created at a rate of 175,000 a day, or
two per second. Most of those are clearly of no interest to advertisers,
but some certainly are - at least for advertisers looking for quantity
over quality. Shiny Media (www.shinymedia.com) believes itself to be the
UK's largest commercial blogging network, with 26 sites, around 1.6
million unique visitors a month and a centralised ad team creating
packages for clients such as Gillette, Sky and Nokia.

"What is particularly attractive to advertisers is that some of our
blogs are really niche, with some very influential users, and if you
build your campaign properly, it can be a hugely effective way to build
word of mouth," says Shiny Media marketing director Justin Hunt.

The fact is that all the commercial models in the UGC space remain
relatively undeveloped. But the scale of this sudden opportunity is
something that still takes a minute to sink in and it points to the fact
that this is no niche platform.

"One fact that knocked me out was something I heard when I was with a
client the other day," says Damian Blackden, Universal McCann European
VP, director of strategic marketing technologies, EMEA. "There's a
billion people online and over half of those people have got some sort
of social content-generated membership. And whereas in the old days
these sites and their user base were relatively hostile towards
advertising, now they are up for being involved."

While the mild anarchy of "me media" may initially have turned corporate
brands off, there now seems little option but to engage. The UGC space
is shaping up to be a never-ending version of the YouTube clip with the
Diet Coke and the Mentos: once it goes off, there's no getting the top
back on.

GLOSSARY

Garage video: material which is uploaded to the web by members of the
public, though not necessarily created by them (see UGC)

Me media: a term coined by a recent Wired magazine article, designed to
encompass blogs, social networks and other UGC platforms generated by
individuals

Nanopublishing: an online publishing model that uses a scaled-down
operation to reach a niche audience. The "nano" refers to the
small-scale, low-cost nature of the site, rather than the potential
audience. Examples include PaidContent and Gawker

Tags: keywords assigned by users to categorise web pages by subject or
category as an alternative to traditional algorithm-based search
engines. Enables social bookmarking, where personal web page bookmarks
are tagged and shared, such as del.icio.us

UGC (user-generated content): a blanket term which covers text, video
and audio material submitted by users and published for general
consumption. Key examples include citizen journalism and YouTube-style
video clips. UGC predates the internet in various forms and is not a
web-only term

Web 2.0: a phrase claimed by internet visionary Tim O'Reilly to
differentiate between interactive, three-dimensional web applications -
Wiki, BitTorrent, blogging, cost-per-click, Flickr etc - and old-school,
prescriptive models - personal websites, page views, domain name
speculation, directories

THE RISE OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT IN THE UK

- In the UK, 27% of frequent internet users aged 16 to 44 have
registered their profile on an online social networking site - fewer
than in Spain and Germany (36% each), but more than in Italy (12%) and
France (15%)

- 7% of the same sample group has edited existing online content, such
as an entry on Wikipedia, compared to 17% of Spaniards surveyed, 10% of
Italians, 14% of Germans and 8% of French

- 5% of the UK sample group have their own blog, while 28% have never
heard of blogs

- 72% of frequent internet users aged 16 to 44 in the UK believe it is
right that websites support advertising if it keeps access free, while
52% say they are more likely to have a good opinion of a company if it
has its own blog

Source: Universal McCann EMEA.