User-generated content – facts and figures. Image: metamorworks|Shutterstock.com
User-generated content encompasses a wide range of media, including wikis, question-and-answer databases, digital videos, blogging, podcasting, forums, review sites, social networks, social media, and mobile phone photography. User-generated content has gained popularity through social media and content-based sharing sites like BuzzFeed.
A well-known and still widely used example of actual user-generated content that is collaboratively edited online is Wikipedia, which has millions of contributors worldwide. In addition to traditional wikis, internet users are increasingly uploading information and posting comments on a variety of different platforms, such as social networks like Facebook and Twitter, or forum communities like Reddit. Sharing photos is one of the most popular content creation activities. Photos, including selfies and pictures of friends and family, are a popular form of content shared on social media by teenagers and young adults in the United States. Among the most popular apps for editing and sharing photos are Instagram, with 1 billion monthly active users, and Snapchat, with 203 million daily active users. In August 2018, 62 percent of US adults had taken a selfie and uploaded it to a social media website.
Product reviews are also a leading content creation activity. The local business review website Yelp had 177 million reviews in 2018, and the book review platform Goodreads had 90 million reviews in July 2019. Other popular types of online reviews include business reviews for restaurants and cafes, followed by reviews of doctors, dentists, and general stores.
Besides photos, videos have also become a popular platform for internet users to create and share content. In December 2018, videos about people and blogs accounted for 32 percent of YouTube's video content and around 19 percent of video views on the platform. The average people and blog video on YouTube was 8.4 minutes long, shorter than the platform average. The number of hours of video uploaded to YouTube is steadily increasing, reaching 500 hours of video uploaded per minute in May 2019. This is perhaps not surprising, given that an October 2018 survey found that 49 percent of US internet users had uploaded or shared a video or photo online in the previous month.
Mobile has proven fertile ground for the increasing use of mobile social video apps. User-generated short clips are immensely popular content – platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram Stories have enabled users to record short clips that can be instantly shared with friends or followers, and there are countless social media accounts dedicated to reposting user-generated content from other platforms.
User-generated content
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