Content Creation at Grassroots in Emerging Markets

Tools such as YouTube and Blogs resulted in an explosion of user-driven content creation on the web. Recent reports indicate there are 200 million active blogs on the Internet [1] and 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute and 4 billion are viewed per day on YouTube [9]. In emerging markets such as India, while there has been increasing penetration of Web usage [3], much of the growth continues to be limited to the urban, well-educated tech-savvy end-user. While the cost of Internet access, lack of literacy, and the ease of use of interfaces contribute to the unsatisfying penetration of the Web in countries such as India, one major reason is also that content on the web has very little direct relevance to the end-users themselves. In fact, much of the content currently consumed in countries such as India is dominated by popular movie songs (audio/video), and news - i.e. content created in a top-down manner for passive consumption. Such content is also readily available on other media such as TV, Radio. The Web at this point does not serve any distinctive and popular content that can attract the vast majority of end-users. Our hypothesis is that to increase the uptake of web, content has to be locally relevant to end-users - both in the choice of language, and the topics addressed, and also end-users have to be involved in the content creation process.