Content is still king – but who’s content?

[Ok, so I haven't blogged in a while. A tad hypocritical of me since I advocate blogging so strongly in my talks. Each time I get an idea for a blog post (which is usually more than once a day) I shift it aside and make something else priority, I think I need to change that, now!]

Ever since the start of the Internet, we’ve been saying that “Content is king” – and that’s been very true. A website with more content – be it text or any other type of content – always won over a website with no content. The content surely had to be good, make no mistake. As the Internet has evolved, I think the content paradigm has evolved as well.

I caught an interesting link on Twitter last night, it was a recent TechCrunch article titled: “Facebook Is Now the Fourth Largest Site In The World.” Facebook boasts 340 million unique visitors during June, 2009. This article returned a memory from a few months ago. I was consulting with a client and helping them understand how Facebook could help their business. I was setting up one lady’s Facebook profile, and it looked very strange. There was nothing going on there, there was more white screen than anything else. This was because she had not “connected” to many friends at the time, so there was little information displaying on her profile. I mentioned this to them, explained how “busy” my profile is, and we had a chuckle, but it’s stayed in my memory – perhaps waiting for me to write this post?!

Content is still the most important component of a website – but who’s content is an entirely new question! We visit Facebook every single day, several times a day, from our desktops, laptops, and mobiles. Who’s content are we looking at though? Facebook’s? Very rarely. We’re looking at content that we’ve created ourselves, or content that our friends have created. Twitter? Twitter without user content is an empty shell. When we go to YouTube, are we viewing their content? Nope. Flickr? Wikipedia?

User-generated content is what really drives the Internet today. And it’s going to get bigger, and bigger. Facebook et al will need to continually make it easier for users (that’s you and me) to publish our own content and share others’ content. It’s about the content, still, but there’s been a shift in who publishers that content.