Business Opportunities Weblog

July 10, 2008 by Rich Whittle | 3 Comments

Newsweek:

When an executive wants to sound humane during a public address to the staff, he or she will trot out the well-worn phrase, “Our most valuable assets leave the building at the end of the day.”

Clichés are generally true, but this one may not be, thanks to the growth of user-generated content on the Internet.

Whether they’re creating content for sites like YouTube and Wikipedia, viewer-submitted news services like CNN’s iReport or videogames like Spore and LittleBigPlanet, today’s most valuable employees will most likely never set foot inside the building—or collect a paycheck.

They may be teenagers posting videos of themselves dancing like Soulja Boy, programmers messing around with Twitter’s tools to create cool new applications or aspiring game developers who want to create the next big thing.

But what they all have in common is a somewhat surprising willingness to work for little more than peer recognition and a long shot at 15 seconds of fame.

Whether these 21st-century worker bees can be said to be having fun (is it really entertaining to update a Wikipedia entry?), there’s no question that their moonlighting has value even if they’re not being compensated.

A YouTube spokesperson informed us that 10 hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute, which she says is the equivalent of 57,000 full-length movies every week.

The comedy site FunnyOrDie may have broken into the national consciousness with Will Ferrell’s hilarious video “The Landlord,” but it’s the cumulative efforts of all the John Q. Comics that will determine the start-up’s future prospects.

We asked FunnyOrDie CEO Dick Glover to calculate what his site’s estimated 10,000 hours of video would cost if professionally produced; at the “inexpensive” industry rate of $400,000 per half hour, it comes out to $8 billion.

As long as so many of you are willing to work for free, the proprietors of these virtual sweatshops will happily accept.

Photo by latinamericanstudies.org.

In Content, Free, Internet | 3 Comments