The Mysterious User Generated Content [Chart of the Week]
We can bet you did not know that social media sites monetize on content generated by users. An interesting infographic captures exactly how content monetization takes place in this scenario. To begin with there were 175 million twitter users as of September 2010 across the world, and approximately 25 billion sent tweets in the year 2010. When compared to the figures for Facebook, Twitter seems like a paltry player in the game. A staggering 360 billion pieces of content are posted or shared on Facebook in one year. This includes links, notes and photographs. This massive amount of content comes from 600 million users (as of September 2010).
The data represented in this graph for images and videos is even more staggering. Thirty-five hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Yes, every minute! An approximate 60 billion videos are watched every day on YouTube. Facebook, though a small contender, is nonetheless a contender in the video content segment as well. Twenty million videos are uploaded every day, and some 2+ billion are watched every day. This is a small number as compared to YouTube.
The story for images is slightly different. With Flickr seeing an upload of an average of 3000+ pictures per minute, and that rate 36 billion images are uploaded to Flickr every year. On the other hand is Facebook which sees 3+ billion photos uploaded to the site every month, which leads to a figure of 36 billion photos every year.
Keeping these figures in mind, the potential for content monetization on UGC is stupendous. Starting with revenue estimates, Twitter made $45 million, followed by LinkedIn at $243 million, MySpace at $288 million and YouTube made $945 million in 2010. If you are wondering why Facebook was left out, well, it is because the figures for Facebook need their own line! Ladies and gentlemen, we learn from Facebook who made a whopping $1.860 BILLION in 2010.
All this makes one wonder if users should own their content. Where would social media sites stand then, if they can’t monetize on UGC?
View the infographic at http://blog.alivenow.in/2011/07/infographic-monetizing-user-generated.html
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