Welcome to the future
In just one minute, people ask Google 3.7 million questions, YouTube users watch more than 4 million videos and Instagram posts receive more than 2 million likes. With such tremendous worldly content consumption, it goes without saying — online content is immensely shaping the way we see and experience the world.
Consumed daily content is influencing the way people travel, eat, shop, exercise or do just about anything else. However, as the amount of shared content is getting bigger day by day, people are starting to get much more choosy about the content which they are willing to pay their attention to. If they used to love reading long texts with no photo material, they now want everything to be as visually compelling and as to the point as possible. If they used to let cheesy over-the-top advertisements influence their daily decisions, they now only listen to the unbiased advice from “real people”, sharing a taste of their experiences as they go through their everyday lives, just as we all do.
As people’s trust in businesses has lowered, the power of user-generated content has skyrocketed; according to Octoly, user generated videos on YouTube get 10 times more views than the content created by the actual brand.
In this new community-centred era, people want to connect and interact with other like-minded and trustworthy individuals and consume content that is authentic, transparent, and easy to identify with — content created by users, for users. With this emerging trend, businesses had to severely change their marketing strategy and shift their focus from business- to user-generated content, leading to the rise of social media influencers.
One of the greatest benefits of social influencer market is influencers’ ability to provide consumers with valuable and believable information at first hand and at the same time help businesses increase their revenues. However, the situation is not as perfect as it may at the first glance seem; in fact, taking a better look raises some big issues, especially considering trustworthiness and fairness of today’s content industry. Looking at the issue of trustworthiness, the fact that the businesses are single-handedly finding people and paying them to review their products or services may lead to biased reviews as the payment can be conditioned with giving a positive review regardless of influencer’s experience with the product or service. The issue regarding fairness of this exponentially growing industry lies in the fact that while each piece of content is helping businesses raise their profits — on-site consumer reviews can increase conversions by 74%, only a few out of all content creators are able to monetize their valuable shared content, making most of their contributions “free” despite actually being of high value.
How to solve this troublesome situation in order to regain back consumers’ trust and provide fairness to all content contributors? What seems to be missing is an intermediary who would solve this “wild west” situation — an intermediary like Futourist, acting as a bridge between businesses and users by creating a system, which will finally ensure that people are most motivated to create honest, unbiased content and are always fairly rewarded for doing so.
With Futourist soon coming to life, everyone, not just the luckiest few, will receive a payment for sharing their valuable opinion with the world. In addition to that, as businesses won’t be able to pressure content creators into writing solely positive reviews and the quality of the reviews will be the main factor in determining how big the rewards will be, people will always be more motivated to write honest, thorough reviews than fake, plain reviews, thus repairing the currently questionably trustworthy reviewing system.
So, what does the future seem to hold for the content industry? Well, one fact is certain: the value of content industry will only continue to rise — if content industry was worth more than $190 billion in 2016, it is expected to rise up to staggering $313 billion by 2019! As people are slowly straying away from the influences of traditional advertising, it seems that the value of user-generated content will only continue to grow further. Becoming one of the most reliable sources for influencing people’s decisions, the content created by users will no longer be perceived as free, as more and more people will begin to realize the actual worth of their contributions and start demanding what was rightfully theirs all along.
Are you ready to take the first step into the future?
Join our Social Channels and become a Futourist!
