UGC isn’t Free and Your Next Big Hit!

UGC (user generated content, you know.. free content.) sure is great, and having your users create content must be profitable, right? Have you considered the hassles that come along with it?

I’m sure many who have worked with websites and concepts based on UGC can agree that there’s more work to it, than it might seem at first. The reality is that it often takes a big effort to foster the creation of the content you desire, as well as to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.

If your platform for UGC gets some decent traction there will be tons of content submitted that is crap, misleading, profane, copyrighted, spam and so forth. Such content can easily destroy the platform/concept you created. Users might be turned off by it and you might get legal issues to waste your time and money on.

Many of these problems can presumably be solved through volunteering users who’re given the role as moderators. That is if you can find users who’re willing to take up the work. But then you get the work of maintaining good relationships with those key users. Do you have time for that?

It might take more work than you think, and it might get complicated. What are you going to do if your moderators, key contributors ét al are suddenly getting into strong disagreements/fights? Will you pick a side and possibly turn away some of the very people who made your concept a success.

So yeah, UGC might sound great as it is free content, but is it really “free” when you need to put in so much work to overlook, moderate and maintain what is being provided by users?

There are many websites that won’t work without UGC as it is the core concept. But I believe there’s even more cases where UGC is a really bad fit, and that people will see in retrospect that just hiring people to create and provide content would have given better results, and not to mention this being cheaper than the cost of handling UGC and a community.

I’m not opposed to UGC, not at all! I believe it’s really great - in some cases. But more than often I hear stuff like “hey, we’re gonna do this and that, and we’ll have users create the content, it’s a sure success!”, and sometimes it seems that most people think that for web startups, newspapers etc., UGC is the only way to go if you want to make tomorrows big hit on the web, as it costs nothing. That, I disagree with!