User-generated content on O’NeillTV
By Janoeke P.
In former times it was hard to entry in the media world. Professionals who were working for a media company produced the media content. Otherwise you could not get your stuff out there. Nowadays it is much easier to publish because of user-generated content. User-generated content is an input from a non-professional user to the content of an online medium. Examples of user-generated contents are photo’s, video’s, reviews or weblogs. Now O’NeillTV (www.oneilltv.com) offers the possibility for user-generated content.
Different types
There are several types of user-generated content. In this article I will explain four of them. The first type is a weblog. A weblog is a kind of logbook with information which the writer wants to share with his audience. Next there are discussion boards: that are Internet forums for discussions and posting user-generated content. The third type of user-generated content is a social networking site. On that kind of sites people have the possibility to interact and share interests and activities. The fourth type is a customer review site. That is a website on which people can post reviews about products or services.
The advantages and disadvantages
The control that brands have over traditional media is not available online. No matter what safeguards social networking sites try to introduce. They can’t control next to which their ads appear. This is a risk of user-generated content for online advertisers. An other problem is that most of the content isn’t that good, it’s not a professional content. In most cases the difference between professional content en user-generated content is easy to notice. But as a social phenomenon user-generated content will have an important place. Nowadays ‘user-generated content’ is an important term. It also became interesting to commerce. This fact has to do with the technical progress of the modern world. It takes less time to upload and download high quantity of data. Also the internet has rather developed.
O’Neill and user-generated content
O’Neill wants to apply user-generated content. The company wants more with their medium O’NeillTV. So far there is the possibility to watch video’s at the website. O’Neill makes O’NeillTV more attractive by giving the visitors the possibility to upload their own surf- and snowboard video’s. They can download the O’NeillTV video’s to add them as a gadget on their site or weblog. I think this is a good option for O’Neill to make O’NeillTV a more interactive and popular site.
