User Generated Content

I’ve really been busy this past month so apologies for the light posting - from closing the recent SynthaSite deal to all the paperwork involved with moving to the US West Coast - it’s been one very busy month. I thought I’d just write a piece and give feedback on how SynthaSite has been doing and what our users are up to!

I’m actually thrilled by the level of interest that SynthaSite has been receiving (and thanks to all my fellow bloggers for their support!). We have signed up over 11,000 users this year, who have produced thousands of websites - with the most unique and unimaginable user generated content.

Here are some of the thousands of sites that our users have created so far :

SAT Bootcamp (Using 3rd party forms creatively to capture leads)
Team69Racing (Someone from my hometown )
Spay Pet (Using Google AdSense)
Parallels vs Bootcamp (Using some nifty HTML to create tables)
Amazon Webstore (using syndicated content from Amazon)
Carbo Rocket (E-Commerce enabled using PayPal)
African Dream Holidays (Microsite for African Dream Holidays, an incuBeta company)

We’re stunned by the ingenuity of our user base - we haven’t even gotten out the gates yet, relatively speaking, and people are really testing the depths of our platform! This is really great to see - and it makes all the hard work very much worth it!

User Generated Content (UGC) is a pivotal part of Web 2.0 in that it demonstrates how users are participating and having a voice on the web. I’m really excited about the year ahead, and I’m looking forward at demonstrating the power of SynthaSite as we open it up to a world of users that have a need for a website, but never wanted to pay for hosting, domains, etc.

Interestingly enough - 5 out of the top 10 countries that we have users in, are from emerging markets (BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) - which points to how starved these countries are for free Internet services such as hosting (in South Africa - bandwidth and hosting is frighteningly expensive). If you think of the volumes of users from these countries, and couple that with the fact that high costs of Internet is actually holding back UGC on platforms such as YouTube, etc - over time, as prices drop, the Internet is going to explode - what you’re seeing today is just the beginning!

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