How to successfully launch a user-generated content platform when you’ve got no audience

Photo credit: Tobias Wrzal.

Does content come first or the audience?

This is the chicken and egg question that every content or social platform faces at the onset, especially the ones focused on user-generated content (UGC). If there’s no content, what will the audience consume? If there is no audience, what’s the incentive for people to create content?

However, the question isn’t that difficult. It actually has an answer. We faced the same question while building Wishfie, a video-only social platform for sharing opinions.

The following are some questions that will help us get to the answer (Guess the answers in your mind as you go through these questions.):

1. Is it possible to curate a reasonable volume of content in the initial stages of your platform through incentives other than guaranteed consumption?
2. Is it possible to get an audience without having any content on your platform?
3. How many times do you post updates on Facebook and other platforms vs how much content do you consume?
4. How many people create content on any platform vs how many people consume content?
5. What do platforms like Facebook want you to do when you first create your account? Add friends, follow people/pages, or post your first status update?

Let’s start with the last question

Facebook and other platforms try to get you to follow as many people or pages and friends as possible when you first register. This is because you’ll come back to the platform only if you see enough content on your news feed. If these platforms made you post a status update while your news feed was empty, you would probably never return.

The rest of the questions probably have obvious answers. The majority of the time, you consume content, but you create it very rarely (maybe once in 10 visits). So, most of the time, you’ll use a platform if it has enough content for you to consume.

This is true for ecommerce too. You need to curate the initial set of businesses who start listing some products (content). Then, when the first customers come in and start transacting, it’s an incentive for other sellers to try listing their products. This is how you kick-start a platform with a two-sided problem.

Aardvark vs Quora

This is the key to the Aardvark vs Quora question. Despite the fact that Aardvark had Google’s backing and came before Quora, it failed to scale. Aardvark focused too much on creation, very little or negligible on consumption. It’s pretty evident from the UX of their website. If you saw their home page, there was nothing to consume! So, unless you really had a question to ask, you would never go to Vark.com. And since you don’t visit often, it’s not even your top-of-the-mind website/platform to ask questions.

On the contrary, Quora focuses on consumption. In fact, “Ask or Search Quora” isn’t the most visible or accessible CTA in the UX. But since there are people consuming content, creators have an incentive to figure out how to ask a question. Quora doesn’t want to compromise on consumption (the right thing to do).

Where to start