User generated content - my new addiction!

As anybody in the digital media world knows, nothing is as hot as user generated content these days. I for one, had been slightly skeptical about why people would pay to watch grainy, out of focus videos of some drunk guy singing to his mates, or some supposedly funny fake gag. However, much to my own horror, I find myself a user generated video junkie today!

It all started on the day O2 finally activated my O2 Active. Browsing through their deck, I came acorss a link called LookatMe! What's this I thought and jumped right in. It said "We've got some of the coolest videos and they've been created by people like you on thier mobile. Some are earning serious cash in the process! Think you can do better?". Below this was a preview image of a video with a "buy for 35p" link and a "vote link". 35 pence, I thought, that's nothing, let me check it out. Clicked on buy and in a few seconds I was watching a dude in white trying to do slam dunks for about 50 seconds. It wasn't particularly funny or well shot. The point however is that it was priced so low that I didn't mind ending up with a lemon. So I clicked back to the home page and found a few search categories -most watched, most recent, by same contributor- and randomly downloaded a few more videos. Some funny, some really bad, some downright bizzare.

In a couple of hours I found myself back on the same page, downloading more videos. Soon, everytime I had some time to kill I was shelling out 35p for some vidoes. Before I knew it I was hooked and then I asked myself just why I was so hooked on downloading mostly bad videos. Two thing struck me - 1. Humans are fundamentally voyeurs. We like to peek into other people's lives; like a fly on the wall, observing unobtrusively. 2. We are all suckers for low price points, low price points encourage impulse purchsases

LookatMe has got their model right! Low price points are sustainable because of volumes and not having to pay hefty content publisher or rights owner revenue shares.