April 28th, 2007
Web 2.0 Social Media: Voyeurs rule, not amateurs!
In my “Social Freeloaders” User Generated Content (UGC) series last year. I created a Web 2.0: Top five social risks list to evaluate the sustainability, or not, of UGC based models.
In asking Social freeloaders: Is there a collective wisdom and can the Web obtain it? last June, I used the pre-Google YouTube as a NOT SO UGC phenomenon case study:
All of the Web 2.0 Social Web properties which rely on users to contribute content are faced with what I call the “Social Freeloaders” phenomenon. As in the “real-world,” interactions within social communities on the Web are dominated by an extremely small, self-selected minority of active, vocal participants.
Currently, YouTube is reporting a video upload to video view ratio of one-tenth of one percent, even though it says it is “empowering” users to “become the broadcasters of tomorrow.
Such was the YouTube UGC situation pre-Google; The YouTube UGC situation post-Google remains the same for the most part.
I heard Suzie Reider, the Google YouTube marketing exec, acknowledge the not quite UGC bandwagon that is still the YouTube clip-culture phenomenon, last week at the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York City.
Reider’s discussion of the metrics on the Intuit TurboTax “Tax Rap” UGC YouTube promotion bolster my “Social Freeloaders” theory. SEE: Intuit: Bad with YouTube, REALLY bad with IRS.
Bottom line? As a relative handful of “users generated content” for the mass consumption of hordes of YouTubers, YouTube sold Intuit access to its video watchers, not its video makers.
Who is seducing whom then? The great UGC seduction targets the saleable media voyeur, not the low-rent amateur creator.
YouTube: the world’s on-demand reality show I said last July, noting “about 20 million unique users are becoming emotionally involved monthly.”
The multi-millions strong YouTuber emotional involvement is derived from voyeuristic thrills though, not artistically creative ones.
Google sells the largest audience of video sharers to its advertisers, it is not hawking the largest audience of video creators to marketers!
At the end of the Web 2.0 UGC day, social media has not usurped the old media production and sales models.
What IS in the process of being displaced? Goodbye couch potato,
HELLO MOUSE TOMATO!
ALSO: MySpace: Worth it, or not? and
Web 2.0: Does ‘old media’ get it? and
Web 2.0 ages: Poor old media? and
Social Networking for the masses: Rise of ‘The Sleuth’
