It looks like a nice business model, you get users to generate your content for you. Many of the new digital media empires like YouTube, Facebook and Foursquare are built upon it.
The Register’s Simon Sharwood looked at the downside of this business model – junk data.
Even the most well intentioned users makes mistakes with thing like addresses and that’s before you get mischief makers or competitors putting in false information.
There’s another aspect too, what one person thinks is relevant may not be to other users or to the people running the service, Simon cites the dozens of “mom’s kitchens” on Foursquare.
For those who’ve added their mom’s house, that’s relevant and maybe even funny to them.
All of this illustrates the downside to the free, User Generated Content (UGC) model; you have to accept what the users give you.
Which means it isn’t free – it has to be collated, processed and the noise has to be filtered out.
At worst, somebody has to make the decision what is relevant and what has to go. This isn’t easy and, as Google found with their Name Wars, can upset a lot of users if it isn’t handled well.
Nothing in life is truly free and with data becoming increasingly important to business it’s worthwhile considering the quality of that free or cheap stuff you get from the net.