Acquisition and Retention via Online Communities EMarketer recently published research into interactive ROI, and concluded that the primary objectives of online marketers are to acquire and retain new customers. Now it’s the fall and little has changed. There are a number of projects, technologies and tactics that can be deployed to drive customer acquisition and retention, and I will be focusing on how publishers and brands can apply their online community platform for this purpose. While the explicit definition of the terms ‘customer’, ‘acquired’ and ‘retained’ vary across organizations, I consider a new registered website user to be acquired, and a returning registered website participant to be retained. (more…)

YouTube quietly moved past a milestone in January, 2009 by surpassing 100 million unique visitors per month in the U.S. This is the first time that a user-generated content (UGC) video sharing website has reached that mark.

eMarketer reported the numbers supplied by comScore last week that show YouTube the runaway leader in U.S. online video viewership. Second was Fox Interactive Media at 62 million unique visitors and Yahoo! was third with just over 40 million unique visitors. (more…)

A report released by eMarketer projects that 70 per cent of US Internet users will be viewing user-generated content (UGC) by 2013. The report looked at data collected over the last year and concluded that the level of viewership will rise by 10 per cent over the next four years.

eMarketer attributes this growth to a number of different factors. The biggest one being the low level of online expertise it takes to view most content. Most providers of content have developed software that is very user-friendly. (more…)

There are more than 80 million creators of user-generated content today in the United States, reports a recent survey by eMarketer, and that number is likely to grow to more than 115 million by 2013. At the same time, the survey estimates there are about 115 million UGC consumers today and their ranks will swell to more than 154 million in the same time period.

At the same time, eMarketer’s senior analyst Paul Verna says that, despite the unbelievable popularity of UGC, “(u)nfortunately, if things stay as they are, this frenzy of content generation and attention is not likely to produce commensurate rewards for marketers or site publishers.” (more…)

User-generated content has quickly become a mainstay of contemporary marketing and public relations campaigns, but advertisers aren’t limiting their buys to the Web only. A recent report by Juniper Research forecasted that mobile UGC will rise from $576 million in 2007 to $5.7 billion globally in 2012.

The rise of smart phones with their combination of cameras, video cameras, faster data and better Web interfaces have made mobile UGC a powerful medium. (more…)