User-Generated Content Trends Shaping 2006

If a single theme defined online culture in 2006, it’s that ordinary people, not media companies, produced the content everyone was talking about. A handful of specific events made that shift impossible to miss.

MySpace held the center of social media

News Corp had acquired MySpace back in 2005, and through 2006 it remained the dominant social network, its pages built almost entirely around user profiles, photos and customized layouts that users coded themselves with cobbled-together HTML. Bands, in particular, used MySpace as a primary way to reach fans directly, without a label’s marketing budget standing between them.

Facebook stopped being a college-only network

For its first two years, Facebook required a school or college email address to join. In September 2006 it opened registration to anyone with a valid email address, a change that significantly widened who could participate in the kind of profile-and-status content that had previously been confined to campuses. That opening matters for anyone tracking user-generated content, because it meant a much broader, older audience was now producing and sharing personal content online.

Google’s acquisition validated video as UGC’s biggest category

Google’s October agreement to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion did more than make headlines. It signaled that video uploaded by ordinary users, not studios or broadcasters, had become valuable enough for one of the largest technology companies in the world to bet over a billion dollars on it.

Wikipedia kept proving crowds could build something durable

By 2006, Wikipedia had grown into one of the most-visited reference sources on the web, built entirely from volunteer contributions and edits rather than a paid editorial staff. Its growth this year reinforced a broader point: given the right structure, large groups of unpaid contributors could produce something more comprehensive than what any single publisher could fund on its own.

Brands started building contests around the trend, not just watching it

Snack and beverage marketers began experimenting with contests inviting customers to create their own ads, with the promise that a winning submission could air during a major televised event. That kind of structured invitation, rather than simply hoping customers would organically create content, marks a shift from brands observing user-generated content to actively engineering opportunities for it.

Time magazine put a mirror on the cover

Time’s decision to name “You” its person of the year for 2006, with a mirrored panel on the cover, was a symbolic capstone to a year defined by these shifts: video sites, social networks and reference projects built almost entirely from what regular people chose to upload, edit and share.

What this adds up to

None of these were coordinated, but together they describe the same shift from several angles: the tools for publishing had gotten easy enough, and the audiences large enough, that the traditional line between media producer and media consumer had started to blur.