Interesting interview in the Financial Express with the director of search research at Yahoo! Research Andrew Tomkins. In the interview Tomkins makes a couple of interesting points about the growth of social media content.

If you look at the amount of new searchable content that is being produced every day, you will find that the amount of content that comes from the social media is much more than the amount of content that is produced by traditional, professional media (like newspapers or professionally developed web sites). In traditional media, around five gigabytes per day of content is being created. Social media content already may be at least twice that.

Social media is a category that was unknown and has shot forward in the volume of content. Almost, 10-15% of global consumption worldwide is of this kind of material rather than the traditional stuff. The jury is still not out on whether the quality per word of social media content will be lower than professional content.

Social media content is still in its infancy. That it is now double the content produced by traditional media outlets is one of the reasons why so many newspapers like The USA Today and Washington Post are racing to add social networking features to their web sites.

Tweet This Post