A new Web site is aiming to make it easier for creators of online user-generated content (UGC) to market and make money from their work.
Designed to become a kind of clearinghouse for UGC creators and producers UserGenerated.com made its debut this week at the User Generated Content Conference & Expo. in San Jose, Calif. (The conference, which runs through Tuesday, is produced by MediaBistro and owned by Jupitermedia, parent company of InternetNews.com.)
The launch is aimed at capitalizing on the growth of user-generated content that’s led to the success of trends like blogging and podcasting and of sites like YouTube. UserGenerated.com will start off as an industry blog and directory, as well as a social network where producers of UGC can display information about themselves and the content they have produced.
However, the creators of the site said they have broader ambitions. Within the next year, they plan to make UserGenerated.com more useful to content producers by providing new ways to market, distribute, and sell their content.
The company said in a statement that UserGenerated hopes to help spawn a new “User Generated Economy,” enabling more UGC creators to realize revenue from what they produce.
“There are truly some great production tools, and loads of people with the skills to create different content,” Chris Andrews, executive producer of UserGenerated.com, said in a statement. “That includes video of important or interesting events, short films, tweets, mobile broadcasting, photos, music, audiobooks, e-books and all that content being created around blogs and social networks. The issue is, what else can you do with the content once it has been created?”
Andrews noted popular UGC sites like Google-owned YouTube are designed for distribution, not the creation of content. He sees UserGenerated.com as helping a transition from “user-generated vanity” to moneymaking opportunities based on their ownership of the content.
“I’d like the person who created the content, to have the maximum flexibility over what they do with their creation,” Andrews said. “They own it.”
Separately, Andrews today also launched Gutenberg.com. The site is designed to be a resource and social network site for anyone interested in e-books and the new generation of e-book players such as Amazon’s Kindle — which Amazon is updating to a new version — and the Sony Digital Reader.