User-Generated Content in the US

According to numbers released by emarketer, 82 million people created content during 2008. This number is expected to grow to nearly 115 million by 2013.


As we can see, most people have generated content on social networks. They mainly post links and photos. But they also create their own videos and post them online. 21.2 million of people in the US are generating content on blogs and 11.6 million use virtual worlds.
As the numbers suggest, more and more people will use social networking as a way to communicate and share content. It is therefore no surprise that new technologies are developed to track users across social networks, blogs and alike, to build consumer profiles and target them with relevant advertisement.
As the amount of information is exploding due to user-generated content, a new challenge will be to sort out the amount of information to uncover interesting information that is not easily accessible through standard search engines.