Teens create content

A new study by the Pew Institute says that "half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators." The PDF of the report is here. Other notable facts are 17% of teens have a blog and 33% say they share content they have created like stories, photos, artwork and videos.

I was in the promoting end user content creation game a little early back in 1999. Back then I thought that all of the new tools and the ease of access was going to mean many people would become content creators. Didn't happen that fast but now it seems that many more people are creating and sharing content.

Probably the two biggest contributors to the content creation explosion are camera phones and blogs. Since most people have their phones with them all of the time and it is fairly easy to send pictures or post them on blogs sites like Flickr and Textamerica have become main stream.

And the trend shows no signs of slowing down. From Russell Beattie's blog: "Camera phones is just the beginning. The other metric to watch is multimedia-enabled phones (read: Music). Whereas camera phones require data-enabled handsets but can work easily on 2.5G networks, music and video phones pretty much require 3G. Watching the growth in that market will show the next stage in mobile data services. Here at home, the fact that Sprint, Verizon and Cingular all now offer music-enabled mobile phones actually shows quite a bit about the maturity of the U.S. mobile market, which I still hear people describe as “behind”. Not as much as it used to be."