photo credit: blmurch

User generated content was the web’s first big take on user generated traffic.  The Digg model harnessed its reader to bring traffic to the site and it was wildly popular … in 2005.  The web has evolved since then.  Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter took the successes of Digg and abstracted them further.  Discussion on the web could now happen in the reader’s own social sphere instead of the inside the greater Digg community.  This was a huge shift and is now a pain-point for sites like Digg.

Sites like Mashable, CollegeHumor.com, FunnyOrDie.com, and BuzzFeed are the new revolutionaries.  Mashable is very systematic and successful at covering socially-viral stories.  CollegeHumor.com and FunnyOrDie.com make a business of creating viral videos.  They’ve figured out what it takes to replicate viral content successes on the internet … and they don’t need small-time UGC sites to get exposure.  CollegeHumor.com’s CEO even went so far as to say that the myth of users generating good content is the biggest myth of the internet.  Meanwhile, BuzzFeed automates their viral coverage through their widgets — rendering the concept of pushing a button to ‘Digg’ something entirely useless and quaint.

So what’s going to happen to ispotastory.com?  If they can climb up the radar a bit, maybe they’ll get bought by Reddit, but I don’t think that’s likely.  Hopefully it’s a site built to serve a passion and the team has a wildly fun time giving it a go on the internet.  Best of luck.

Then, somebody had the genius idea to turn each piece of content into a mini-forum — comments were born!  I post something on my blog, the readers discuss, I participate, and we’re one big happy family that turns into a billion clones over night.

The Digg model followed.  Why go through the effort of creating content when all you really need is the discussion — the readers?  Instead, the site was a community center and anybody could bring up any topic at the community discussion as long as they went through the effort of bringing it up.  Instead of getting everybody to discuss the latest New York Times article on NYTimes.com, some of the discussion was siphoned off to Digg, Reddit, Mixx, etc.  The discussion was no longer owned by the content producer.  The discussion was part of the community.

Digg is now faltering as its centralized-community model crumbles to the customized-community model.  Why should I discuss the latest news with a bunch of trolls on Digg when I can discuss it with my friends on Facebook?  I don’t care what LuvPalin_2012 thinks about the latest news in Iraq.  I care what my friends think.  I’d rather discuss it with them.

And this makes it tremendously more difficult for content producers to benefit (get pageviews) from the discussion happening in the community.  Instead of a single Digg link that drives thousands of visits, producers need hundreds of Facebook links or Twitter tweets to show up in hundreds of their reader’s micro-communities.  But if content producers can harness these communities to drive traffic, they’ll be on the cusp of the next big thing.  Mashable is already there.

So that’s the shake-up we’re in.  Facebook has already replaced Digg and is now challenging Google.  Facebook, or its successor, is going to win.