Comcast and its new Ziddio UGC platform, which is being beta tested, is an example of the latter. "We support the independent creative community, and this is one way to continue to do that," says Caroline Marks, general manager of video at Comcast. During the beta phase, the company is soliciting UGC only through corporate-sponsored contests, but by the end of the first quarter it expects to open the platform to all creators.

Yahoo! also has moved into the UGC market over the past few years, adding a podcasting service and a blog search, as well as user-generated content within Yahoo! Video, where it added a mechanism for uploading UGC in June 2006.

"User-generated content is one of the key elements to our strategy," says Jeff Karnes, Yahoo!'s director of multimedia search. "We fundamentally believe in the social web and people's ability to participate." Yahoo! also owns Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Jump Cut, an online video editing and remixing site; other UGC initiatives include You Witness News, in partnership with Reuters, and The Yahoo! Talent Show.

Another way corporations are getting involved in UGC online is by posting trailers, clips or advertisements on UGC platforms to generate buzz about their businesses. "These big companies are getting into it," Karnes says.

Ingrid Moon, an interactive-media management consultant specializing in UGC, cautions, however, that while corporations want to be involved in this market, they are still trying to figure out the best way to do so. "More corporate entities are using UGC to market their properties," she says, "but they still don't get it."

"User-generated content is one of the key elements to our strategy," says Yahoo!'s Jeff Karnes. Yahoo! also owns Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Jump Cut, an online video editing and remixing site.

Expanding to New Platforms
User-generated content is starting to appear in other media outside of the Internet. Revver, an online site that attaches advertising to UGC and splits revenues 50/50 with content owners, announced a deal in November to provide user-generated videos to Fame TV, an all-UGC channel available to more than eight million BskyB digital subscribers. New material, selected from Revver by Fame, runs each month, with permission from the creator, and Fame TV viewers can vote on their favorites via cell phone, with the top vote-getters airing more often. Payment to creators is based on the number of votes.

Comcast's Ziddio is a multiplatform service; some users' content will be distributed over Comcast's video-on-demand television service as well as on broadband. "We're focusing on the confluence of online and VOD," says Marks. She points out that the company's VOD services already distribute content from independent studios such as Icebox and Heavy; its Anime Select channel is running a contest calling for viewer submissions, with the winner going to the Tokyo Animation Festival.

Online UGC services are also making a move to the mobile platform. Revver distributes content through Verizon's VCAST service, for example, and has become one of the top channels on that service, according to Steven Starr, Revver's founder/ceo. "It shows there's a real appetite for user-generated on mobile phones," he says.

In addition to mobile extensions of online platforms, there are several efforts that focus exclusively on the distribution of UGC over cell phones. These are mostly off-deck or direct-to-consumer initiatives, meaning they can be accessed by anyone with a video- or mobile web-capable phone, regardless of the carrier.

GoFresh, a German mobile content company that debuted in 2003, entered the UGC market in February 2006 with itsmy.com. By January 2007 itsmy.com had 250,000 users in 100 countries, according to Mikko Saarelainen, head of mobile content; in December alone, the service generated 80 million page impressions. The process is mobile from beginning to end.

Andrew Bovingdon, describes Bango as a YouTube for mobile. It service allows users to market, sell and deliver mobile content directly to phone users over the mobile Internet.

Similarly, the Bango service allows users to market, sell and deliver mobile content directly to phone users over the mobile Internet. "It's like YouTube for mobile," says Andrew Bovingdon, Bango's vp of product marketing. Brand owners of various types, as well as independent creators, are using the platform.

Peperoni, based in Germany, is a service that enables mobile phone users to create their own communities at Peperonity.com and, through a partnership with Bango, charge for content. The company was launched in 2001 to provide on-deck services to operators, and it soon introduced a site to showcase off-portal content. "It was a mechanism to create attention with operators, but end users found it and began creating sites," says Marcus Ladwig, Peperoni's coo.

Research company Informa estimates the market for mobile user-generated content and social networking at $3.45 billion globally in 2006, and predicts that number will rise to $13 billion by 2011. Asia is the most active territory by far, followed by Europe and North America.

Several trends point toward growth in mobile UGC. Almost all global carriers now accept off-deck content, to varying degrees, something that wasn't true a couple of years ago. There are several companies, including Google and Yahoo!, that have implemented mobile search engines, which makes it easier to find off-deck content without going through a portal or aggregator. Handsets are becoming more sophisticated and less costly, and there are more ways for content providers to generate revenues. The recent launch of the ".mobile" extension to identify mobile-Internet sites should raise the profile of cell phone-distributed content.