X
Home & Office

UPDATED: User generated content bubble popping

[Updated: To clarify Videoegg is not closing, it is closing its doors to user generated content.]User generated content was supposed to be a goldmine.
Written by Tom Foremski, Contributor

[Updated: To clarify Videoegg is not closing, it is closing its doors to user generated content.] User generated content was supposed to be a goldmine. Get users to generate text, photos, videos and then they tell all their friends and family and you monetize all that free content, free marketing and free traffic.

Well, it doesn't quite work that way.

Videoegg is closing its doors to user generated content and told its users on April 1st that they should come and download their content off of its servers by the end of May. Stage6, another video hosting site closed down completely earlier this year.

my.videoegg.com will be decommissioned and services will end as of May 31, 2008. Upload features have already been disabled. Please plan accordingly and see the FAQ for more information.

There are well over a hundred similar sites just in the video space. This is bad news for user generated content if we see more of this.

Why should users go to all that trouble of creating and uploading and then marketing their stuff to their friends and families if their content might not be there in a few months or a year? They won't.

What's the future? Host it on your family server. We'll have an always-on broadband wireless world sooner than later, and we have tons of cheap storage. (We don't need no stinking YouTube servers.... :-)

Editorial standards