User content helpful for old media

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on January 4, 2007 at 11:25 AM

Old media will benefit from user-generated content, said a report from Deloitte consulting firm. This is encouraging news for an industry that felt threatened by the new generation of user-content for a long time.

Print and TV “are very well positioned to adopt some of the technology and some of the emerging social practice ... but incorporating it alongside traditional media channels to create an overall richer product," said Howard Davies, director of media strategy at Deloitte.

Many major media companies have already resorted to using, and even paying for, user-generated content. Among them, Reuters, BBC, BskyB and more…

Deloitte’s report also mentioned, on the other hand, that revenues were likely to be limited.

"There's something about the social user ... community that is absolutely not professional and so the community doesn't want it to be commercialized," said Davies.

The consultancy firm’s report is good news though, and should help to shed the old media’s paranoid fear of the ‘user-generated generation’.

Hardly in line with the above, but as useful to old media companies, the Deloitte report emphasized the 2007 challenge for media companies to crack into the Chinese market.

Source: Reuters

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