• by January 4, 2006

The headline on the press release screamed: "Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve Issues 2006 Predictions: Consumers Creating Control."

Gee, did we really need Faith to tell us that? Media magazine, and OnlineMediaDaily have been talking about consumer-generated media for close to a year; the magazine's cover story on the trend hit in April 2005. It's clear that media companies, advertisers, agencies, and investors have begun taking it seriously. Look at MySpace.com, the plethora of blogs, podcasts, Wikipedia, you name it....

Yes, we are creating our own media, and media companies have taken note. They also see that such content can be generated and distributed for free, or almost-free. Bloggers, or at least those who work for media companies like Gawker, Yahoo!, and yes, Microsoft (it's not really a media company, is it?), get paid by the post and/or by the traffic they generate. It's a strange economic calculus, but one that is increasingly becoming the norm. When it comes to consumer-generated video--mini movies, clips, digital still photos, etc.--media companies are finding they have a lot of content to pick and choose from. There is a ton of free content and it's virtually without copyright. Of course, savvier content creators won't be ripped off.

This week, OnlineMediaDaily's intrepid contributor Jonathan Blum is covering the vast consumer electronics bazaar known as CES in Las Vegas. He tells the Minute that the big story this year isn't so much the gadgets, as it is the content that's destined for distribution on those gadgets. "Advertisers could clean up here," he tells us. We are eager to see which ones will manage to spin content into gold.