The rising popularity of videogame website Giant Bomb has made me keenly aware of a phenomenon that exists uniquely in the medium of Internet content. Giant Bomb – like many other popular sites today – is a site that focuses on community-generated content. Users submit content for gamewikis , upload screenshots and do just about everything, except for video reviews (which are created by the sites editorial members), that corresponds with their virtual hobby.
It’s an approach that combines and borrows the primary elements of Wikipedia and Gamefaqs, essentially fostering content that is supported extensively by users. Users who submit frequently enough can get onto a “top users” board, garnering a little street cred and the respect of their fellow user friends.
With such a user-centric style, Giant Bomb’s approach is one that puts community at the top of the pedestal. Users’ submissions aren’t relegated to the dungeons of forum land. Posts aren’t reduced to a “user blogs” section, as we’ve see on sites like 1Up andGamespot . User submissions are as essential to the site as content created by paid staff. Users, unlike the journalists that created the website, submit content not as a way to make a living, though. They do it out of
But how fair is it for a site’s primary content to be created by unpaid contributors, while publishers and site staff bring in the money?
Some might say that this approach, if taken to far, could step on some unethical ground.
Now, community-generated content is hardly a new thing. Wikipedia, one of the most popular sources of information in the world, is put together entirely by regular people who submit content. But Wikimedia is a non-profit organization. The website doesn’t sell ad space.
Users therefore don’t feel slighted to have their content displayed in a free, public space, where business and profit-building are not a factor.
When money and advertising are involved though, things get complicated. I think of adverts as a transaction of money – if I were to host ads on Society Eye, I would be making money off of readers, which I consider a transaction from you to me. Which doesn’t sound fair. Advertising on websites is a transaction of virtual dollars. After all, when advertisers pay to put their ads on a site, they can reasonably expect to recoup their expense in the form of sales as a direct result of said ad.
Information websites that do host ads, then, are out there to make money out of readers. Which is more than fair if the site creators are sacrificing their time – like with a real job – to create content for us to consume. We ought to pay for the product in some way, so “advertising dollars” is a suitable exchange, compared to paying money to view content. The economy of web journalism is based on this. We expect to see ads in exchange for information.
But what if the information is essentially our communal creation in the first place? Surely this is an ethical dilemma to be faced in the near future, as more and more websites put community on the same pedestal that sites like Giant Bomb do.
Giants like Youtube or College Humour are very guilty of this; the ethics of viewing communal content at the exchange of virtual dollars always been my problem with the sites. Apart from a few original, site-created videos, these sites are comprised of videos submitted by users. Sure, our virtual dollars are going towards the maintenance and upkeep of the sites, to allow the community to participate in the phenomenon in the first place – but the real tension is that these sites are businesses, and many users are unaware of this fact.
This slave-community phenomenon is strongly reflected in blog culture. Gawker sites like Kotaku and Gizmodo are placing increasing emphasis on the importance of user comments. A “star” system implemented freshly this year gives prominence to comments by users proven to be intelligent and articulate. As a result, often the quality of the sites’ comments is as good as the content of the blog articles themselves. Readers like me, then, will read a blog article and then scour the comments for even better insights and opinions about a given topic. Comments are a part of the blog – no longer an ambivalent add-on that functions to appease the rants of attention-seeking plebs. Just like the user-generated content on Giant Bomb orWikipedia, the blog commenting community serves as an important additional layer of information that we as consume as readers.
As journalism tries to find a way to make money off of their audience, the Internet and its communities are growing. Readers want their information to be quick and comprehensive: something that understaffed websites can’t compete with. If the trend of user-generated content continues, therefore, it’s likely we’ll see even more websites relying on their readership to fill in the blanks.
It’s vital that sites don’t take advantage of their users’ contributions to content. To do that, they’ll have to find ways to pay their users back for their efforts.
