Is Youtube turning Couch Potatos into Amateurs Producers?

Think all lazy couch potatoes suddenly become ardent amateur TV producers, photographers and citizen journalists in the age of web 2.0 ? Not really.

A recent study shows that only 0.16 percent of people who visit YouTube actually upload video for others to watch. Also, only two-tenths of 0.2 percent of vistors to Flickr, the popular photo sharing website, actually upload new photos. The backgrounder: visits to web 2.0 sites have grown 6 to 7 folds in past two years.

Before we get to read the methodology of the research, we can well disregard the findings of the research, which is not exactly what we expected.
But it can well be close to reality. While sharing is fun and rewarding, uploading videos and photos can be time-consuming and troublesome for many people, unless you happen to be an artistic techie.

Here's a more essential take-away point: not everybody has the patience and time to go through hundreds of thousands of real amateur stuff--meaning purely self-entertaining and with low production quality. Thus we need goal keeper and filter more than ever in an age of amateurs .

It's true that with all the web2.0 platforms the creativity of amateurs are unleashed like never before, but most people will still be passive audience and they want to see well-made stuff not just home-made videos by his neighbor, at least for a long time to come.

But it will take some visionary media professionals to figure out a way to turn that huge amount of creativity to something meaningful and valuable. And that'll be the Next Big Thing after YouTube.