Steve Outing discusses the lessons he learned from his failed experiment in grassroots media, The Enthusiast Group.
Among them:
In my view — and based in part on my experience with the Enthusiast Group project — user content when it stands on its own is weak. But it’s powerful when appropriately combined with professional content, and properly targeted.
I went in to the Enthusiast Group venture believing that grassroots or user content could survive (mostly) on its own. After all, Youtube has done pretty well for itself with amateur video; there are a lot of crappy videos on that site, as well as brilliant, funny, entertaining ones. Ditto for Flickr for amateur photos.
But those websites managed to catch fire, and the size of the audience ensured that there would be enough great content to attract and retain a huge audience. For less-grandiose operations with smaller audiences — and unlikely prospects for hitting it big — I am not convinced that user content can a successful website make.
