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FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog

January 26, 2007

Stuff By Us, Part One

A panel at Davos on user-generated content--or "stuff by us"--brought together some interesting folks, including Michael Wolf, the recently ousted president and chief operating officer of MTV, Thomas Glocer, the CEO of Reuters, and Shelly Lazarus, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather. As often happens here, there were some pretty intriguing characters in the audience, too, including Chad Hurley, the co-founder and CEO of YouTube, and Jeff Jarvis, editor of Buzzmachine.com and all-around interactive media guru. I'll pass along some of the better comments in a series of posts, beginning with one from Michael Wolf.

Wolf pointed out that the supposedly viewer-generated content that gets the most traffic on sites like YouTube in fact consists of professionally produced material that has been clipped, manipulated and mashed up by users--think clips of Steven Colbert or Saturday Night Live. The message: "Big media companies need to realize that allowing your content to be unleashed on the Internet will only enhance your brand rather than hurt it." Ironic, then, that a factor behind Wolf's departure from MTV was supposedly the frustration of Sumner Redstone, chairman of MTV parent Viacom, at MTV's failure to acquire MySpace (which was bought by Rupert Murdoch).