Youtube and ugc

YOUTUBE AND

UGC

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February of 2005, on which users can upload, share and view videos

uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5. technology to display a wide variety of user-

generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.

Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the YouTube partnership program.

Unregistered users may watch videos, and registered users may upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users 18 years old and older.

In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. 

Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".

Video technology

Adobe Flash Player plug-in Only browsers that support HTML5 Video

using the H.264 or WebM formats can play the videos, and not all videos on the site are available.

Only users having an account. Time duration File size Container formats: .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, DivX,.FLV,

and .ogg and .ogv, Video formats: MPEG-4, MPEG, VOB,

and .WMV, 3GP(mobiles) 3D videos - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ANcspdYh_U

Content accessibility Platforms

Uploading

Pros cons

USER GENERATED CONTENT

UGC

User generated content (UGC) covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies.

It entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles. Its use for a wide range of applications, including problem processing, news, gossip and research, reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public.

All digital media technologies are included, such as question-answer databases, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review-sites, social networking, mobile phone photography and wikis.

In addition to these technologies, user generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software, and flexible licensing or related agreements to further reduce the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery.

Sometimes UGC can constitute only a portion of a website.

The OECD has defined three central schools for UGC : Publication requirement: While UGC could be made by a user and

never published online or elsewhere, we focus here on the work that is published in some context, be it on a publicly accessible website or on a page on a social networking site only accessible to a select group of people (eg, fellow university students). This is a useful way to exclude email, two-way instant messages and the like.

Creative effort: of 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 which 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. If a user uploads his/her photographs, however, expresses his/her thoughts in a blog, or creates a new music video, this could be considered UGC. Yet the minimum amount of creative effort is hard to define and depends on the context.

Creation outside of professional routines and practices: User generated content is generally created outside of 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.

The British Broadcasting Corporation set up a user generated content team as a pilot 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 organisations in 2005-2006, who realised, particularly in the wake of the 7th July bombings, that citizen journalism could now become a significant part of broadcast news. Sky News, for example, regularly solicits for photographs and video 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", meaning all of the people who contribute to user generated media such as YouTube and Wikipedia.

Motivation and incentives

Implicit incentives: These incentives are not based on anything tangible. Social incentives are the most common form of implicit incentives. These incentives allow the user to feel good as an active member of the community. These can include relationship between users, such as Facebook’s friends, or Twitter’s followers. Social incentives also include the ability to connect users with others, as seen on the sites already mentioned as well as sites like YouTube or Look at that Baby, which allow users to share media from their lives with others. Other common social incentives are status, badges or levels within the site, something a user earns when they reach a certain level of participation which may or may not come with additional privileges. Yahoo! Answers is an example of this type of social incentive. Social incentives cost the host site very little and can catalyze vital growth; however, their very nature requires a sizable existing community before it can function.

Explicit incentives: These incentives refer to tangible rewards. Examples include financial payment, entry into a contest, a voucher, a coupon, or frequent traveler miles. Direct explicit incentives are easily understandable by most and have immediate value regardless of the community size; sites such as the Canadian shopping platform Wishabi and Amazon Mechanical Turk both use this type of financial incentive in slightly different ways to encourage user participation. The drawback to explicit incentives is that they may cause the user to be subject to the overjustification effect, eventually believing the only reason for the participating is for the explicit incentive. This reduces the influence of the other form of social or altruistic motivation, making it increasingly costly for the content host to retain long-term contributors

1. Power Users – These are the people you’re likely asking about.  They spend inordinate amounts of time contributing to the website.  They might be moderating categories on Wikipedia, writing 100′s of restaurant / bar reviews on Yelp, checking-in and commenting on ever Foursquare venue or even writing entire transcriptions of TV shows on ViiKii.net.  Or let’s face it – writing lots of answers on Quora.These people use these networks for a variety of reasons but it relates to:- enjoyment from being a creator rather than just a reader- creation of social status within the organization for having contributed- rewards or perceived rewards for achieving status (kind of like collecting airline miles- self promotion in order to gain status that might either help with future job prospects or to drive traffic to ones website for primary business- to meet friends / other people that are similarly inclined because they, too, are “power users.”

I tell people who built UGC websites that you really need to cater to the 1% users.  They need to have the right tools, social status, rewards and stickiness to your product because they don’t want to abandon their creation.  You live or die on the power users because they build the most compelling content and help promote your website (because it helps them).

2. Casual Contributors – These people are uninterested in achieving status on your website.  They had a very positive or negative experience and they want to tell the world.  They are passionate about a topic (like this one for me!) and they feel inclined to spend some time contributing.

For casual contributors the system MUST be quick and easy.  They don’t want to figure out how your complicated stuff works.  They don’t want to register for everything and they don’t care about your points or game mechanics.  As you scale your business they are tremendously important because at scale their contributions really add up.

3. Lurkers.  Most UGC sites try to spend time converting lurkers to contributors.  Don’t.  90% of all users will never contribute anything to your company.  They are there to ingest content.

Different types of user generated content.

Discussion boards Blogs Wikis Social networking sites Advertising Fanfiction News Sites Trip planners Memories Mobile Photos & Videos Customer review sites Experience or photo sharing sites Any other website that offers the opportunity for the user to

share their knowledge and familiarity with a product or experience

Audio Video games User maps on Duke Nukem 3D and other video games Maps and location systems

Player generated content. Player generated content is the concept of video

game content being created by the players of the game, as opposed to being created by a game's publisher or author.

Player generated content is common in tabletop role playing games where a game master creates a narrative or adventure for the other players to encounter. Interfaces for player generated content has been attempted in various PC games such as Neverwinter Nights and Counterstrike with some success, though the editors to create usable levels are often difficult for the average user.

LittleBigPlanet provided one of the biggest breakthroughs by delivering level design tools as a focal feature of the game that were fast and approachable. With content shared amongst the community in a centralized resource, a large amount of creations were designed and shared by players seamlessly within the game itself. A streamlined communication system further encouraged content creation by making distribution and playing with friends easy. So integrated was the experience that players could use custom shared objects in their own levels or even design levels collaboratively with up to three other players simultaneously.

Often UGC is partially or totally monitored by website administrators to avoid offensive content or language, copyright infringement issues, or simply to determine if the content posted is relevant to the site's general theme.

However, there has often been little or no charge for uploading user generated content. As a result, the world's data centers are now replete with exabytes of UGC that, in addition to creating a corporate asset, may also contain data that can be regarded as a liability.

Top 15 Most Popular Web 2.0 Websites | August 2011

1. YouTube2. Wikipedia3. Twitter4. craigslist5. WordPress6. Flickr7. IMDB8. Photobucket9. Blogger10. Tumblr11. eHow12. Yelp*13. TypePad14. HubPages15. Digg