User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is content generated by users of the Internet such as images, videos, audio, text, testimonials, and software.
Definition The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has defined three core variables for UGC:
Accessible Content: User-generated content (UGC) is publicly produced through platforms located on the Internet and is available to any individual browsing such a publicly accessible website or a public social media account. There are other contexts where users must remain in a community or closed group to access and publish on such platforms (for example, wikis). This is a way of differentiating that although the content is accessible to the audience, there are certain restrictions for the users who generates the content. Creative effort: Creative effort was put into creating the work or adapting existing works to construct a new one; i.e. users must add their own value to the work. UGC often also has a collaborative element to it, as is the case with websites that users can edit collaboratively. For example, merely copying a portion of a television show and posting it to an online video website (an activity frequently seen on the UGC sites) would not be considered UGC. However, uploading photographs, expressing one's thoughts in a blog post or creating a new music video could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context. Creation outside professional routines and practices: User-generated content is generally created outside professional routines and practices. It often does not have an institutional or a commercial market context. In extreme cases, UGC may be produced by non-professionals without the expectation of profit or remuneration. Motivating factors include connecting with peers, achieving a certain level of fame, notoriety, or prestige, and the desire to express oneself.
Media pluralism
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.Cisco Systems. 201. The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis. In 2016, the number of active websites surpassed 1 billion, up from approximately 700 million in 2012.Internet Live Stats. 2017. Total number of websites.
Reaching 1.66 billion daily active users in Q4 2019, Facebook is the most popular social media platform globally.TechCrunch. 2020. Facebook hits 2.5B users in Q4 but shares sink from slow profits. TechCrunch. Available at https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/29/facebook-earnings-q4-2019/. Accessed 18 February 2020. Other social media platforms are also dominant at the regional level such as: Twitter in Japan, Naver in the Republic of Korea, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) in Africa, VKontakte (VK) and Odnoklassniki (eng. Classmates) in Russia and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, WeChat and QQ in China.
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. Jami, Signal, Snapchat, Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp), but they have tended to occupy niches and to facilitate the exchanges of information that remain rather invisible to larger audiences.
Production of freely accessible information has been increasing since 2012. In January 2017, Wikipedia had more than 43 million articles, almost twice as many as in January 2012. This corresponded to a progressive diversification of content and an increase in contributions in languages other than English. In 2017, less than 12 percent of Wikipedia content was in English, down from 18 percent in 2012.Wikimedia Foundation. 2017. Wikipedia Statistics. Available at https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm . 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. For example, while content on Africa has dramatically increased, a significant portion of this content has continued to be produced by contributors operating from North America and Europe, rather than from Africa itself.
History The Oxford English Dictionary was primarily composed of user-generated content. 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 1990s several electronic bulletin board systems were based on user-generated content. Some of these systems have been converted into websites, including the film information site IMDb which started as rec.arts.movies in 1990. With the growth of the World Wide Web the focus moved to websites, several of which were based on user-generated content, including Wikipedia (2001) and Flickr (2004).
User-generated Internet video was popularized by YouTube, an online video platform founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen in April 2005. It enabled the video streaming of MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) user-generated content from anywhere on the World Wide Web.
The BBC set up a pilot user-generated content team in April 2005 with 3 staff. 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. After the Buncefield disaster the BBC received over 5,000 photos from viewers. The BBC does not normally pay for content generated by its viewers.
In 2006, CNN launched CNN iReport, a project designed to bring user-generated news content to CNN. Its rival Fox News Channel launched its project to bring in user-generated news, similarly titled "uReport". This was typical of major television news organizations in 2005–2006, who realized, particularly in the wake of the London 7 July bombings, that citizen journalism could now become a significant part of broadcast news. Sky News, for example, regularly solicits photographs and videos from its viewers.
User-generated content was featured in Time magazine's 2006 Person of the Year, in which the person of the year was "you", referring to the user.
Ranking and assessment 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. Social science research can benefit from having access to the opinions of a population of users, and use this data to make inferences about their traits. Applications in information technology seek to mine end user data to support and improve machine-based processes, such as information retrieval and recommendation. However, processing the high volumes of data offered by UGC necessitate the ability to automatically sort and filter these data points according to their value.
Determining the value of user contributions for assessment and ranking can be difficult due to the variation in the quality and structure of this data. The quality and structure of the data provided by UGC is application-dependent, and can include items such as tags, reviews, or comments that may or may not be accompanied by useful metadata. Additionally, the value of this data depends on the specific task for which it will be utilized and the available features of the application domain. Value can ultimately be defined and assessed according to whether the application will provide service to a crowd of humans, a single end user, or a platform designer.
The variation of data and specificity of value has resulted in various approaches and methods for assessing and ranking UGC. The performance of each method essentially depends on the features and metrics that are available for analysis. Consequently, it is critical to have an understanding of the task objective and its relation to how the data is collected, structured, and represented in order to choose the most appropriate approach to utilizing it. The methods of assessment and ranking can be categorized into two classes: human-centered and machine-centered. Methods emphasizing human-centered utility consider the ranking and assessment problem in terms of the users and their interactions with the system, whereas the machine-centered method considers the problem in terms of machine learning and computation. The various methods of assessment and ranking can be classified into one of four approaches: community-based, user-based, designer-based, and hybrid. Community-based approaches rely on establishing ground truth based on the wisdom of the crowd regarding the content of interest. The assessments provided by the community of end users is utilized to directly rank content within the system in human-centered methods. The machine-centered method applies these community judgments in training algorithms to automatically assess and rank UGC. User-based approaches emphasize the differences between individual users so that ranking and assessment can interactively adapt or be personalized given the particular requirements of each user. The human-centered approach accentuates interactive interfaces where the user can define and redefine their preferences as their interests shift. On the other hand, machine-centered approaches model the individual user according to explicit and implicit knowledge that is gathered through system interactions. Designer-based approaches primarily use machine-centered methods to essentially maximize the diversity of content presented to users to avoid constraining the space of topic selections or perspectives. The diversity of content can be assessed with respect to various dimensions, such as authorship, topics, sentiments, and named entities. Hybrid approaches seek to combine methods from the various frameworks to develop a more robust approach for assessing and ranking UGC. Approaches are most often combined in one of two ways: the crowd-based approach is often used to identify hyperlocal content for a user-based approach, or a user-based approach is used to maintain the intent of a designer-based approach.
Types There are a number of types of user-generated content: Internet forums, where people talk about different topics; blogs are services where users can post about multiple topics, product reviews on a supplier website or in social media; wikis such as Wikipedia and Fandom allow users, sometimes including anonymous users, to edit the content. Another type of user-generated content are social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, TikTok, or VK, where users interact with other people via chatting, writing messages, posting images or links, and sharing content. Media hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo allow users to post content. Some forms of user-generated content, such as a social commentary blog, can be considered as a form of citizen journalism.
Blogs
Blogs are websites created by individuals, groups, and associations. They mostly consist of journal-style text and enable interaction between a blogger and reader in the form of online comments. Self-hosted blogs can be created by professional entities such as entrepreneurs and small businesses. Blog hosting platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Medium; Typepad is often used by media companies; Weebly is geared for online shopping. Social networking blogging platforms include Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Weibo. Among the multiple blogs on the web, Boing Boing is a group blog with themes including technology and science fiction; HuffPost blogs include opinions on subjects such as politics, entertainment, and technology. There are also travel blogs such as Head for Points, Adventurous Kate, and an early form of The Points Guy.