Monetizing user generated content in emerging interactive media

Abstract

Technology has created a completely new and ever-changing marketing and media economy. Hundreds of millions of interactive media users have migrated to various digital platforms (You tube, Twitter, Face book) and spend hours a day engaged in media behaviors that barely existed a short time ago. Most of the websites or forums are available to the public for free usage. With each new user the company incurs an additional cost. Hence with every emerging platform and every new user connection, one critical question persists: how is it monetized? This project tries to answer the question of monetization of the user generated content in interactive media. In this study, we first explain the interactive media sector, and then explore the existing revenue models of the networking websites. Then we analyze some new and innovative revenue models that are currently used by some websites. This is followed by a study on the emerging long tail marketing and buzz marketing concepts, and how these can be used to monetize twitter. Finally we conclude by giving recommendations as how the websites should evolve in order to generate sizeable revenues