Jeff Jarvis writes on “business waiting to be grabbed” building on a comment by AOL’s Jonathan Miller that two-thirds of a user’s time online is spent on audience-generated content (as opposed to professionally created content):
Tools to create content. This means weblog tools and video and audio tools. It means mobile tools, too. And it means tools for individuals and groups. Tools to manage and share content. We need the means to store and serve our stuff, to file it away and find it again. The means to find the stuff we want to find: searches, directories, links, categorization, recommendations, reviews. If you can’t find the content, it’s not content yet. The means to find and make stars. All citizens’ media will not be created equal. Stars will emerge. Stars will move to other media. This will also validate citizens’ media. It’s a two-sided coin: The creators will need agents and marketers to discover them and package them and sell them; the audience of audiences will need help to find the best: It’s the atomic American Idol. The capture of buzz. The unique value of citizens’ media is that it captures what the citizens — the audience, the marketplace, the electorate, depending on your vantage — are thinking and saying. That needs to be grabbed and measured, a la Technorati. Interactivity. This is first and foremost a social enterprise. People want to talk and share. That is much of the content of the people’s content. Targeting. What will make all this pay, economically, is that all this allows marketers who are allowed in to target messages to willing and receptive audiences; that will be the key and killer strength of citizens’ media over the pro’s.
