Home-made videos, songs, Web blogs and other user-generated content online will eventually exceed the amount of professionally produced content, a senior Google executive said on Thursday.
Asked if the volume of home-produced entertainment and information could overtake the amount of professional content, Nikesh Arora, European head of the Internet search engine told Reuters in an interview, "Of course. Definitely."
He said he expected it would happen during the lifetime of people who are middle-aged today.
"And it will end up being the feeding ground for more professionally generated content," Arora added.
His comments came after Google on Tuesday closed its $1.65 billion acquisition of the online video-sharing site YouTube, a popular site for home-made content.
"18 months ago, YouTube did not exist, and now millions of people are watching videos on it," he said, noting that many amateur singers and actors now had wider audiences than established artists.
"For the first time, Internet allows people to say: I hear what you said, now let me tell you what I think," he said.
Asked if Google would continue to hunt for acquisitions, he said: "There is nothing that comes to mind, but we will continue to do partnerships and study industry phenomena."
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| Larry Page, co-founder of Google Inc., delivers a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada January 6, 2006. Home-made videos, songs, Web blogs and other user-generated content online will eventually exceed the amount of professionally produced content, a senior Google executive (not shown) said on Thursday. |
During his one-day visit to Montpellier, Arora said he believed a third of European bloggers were in France.
"French people like to express their opinions, and I think it’s a good thing! What is a society without people wanting to express themselves?" he said.
The average blogger in Europe is 10 years younger than the average European online consumer, he said, and the average blogger spends 19 hours a week on the web, compared with 14 hours for the average online consumer.
Arora said already 15 percent of all the world’s information, whether in print or in audio-visual form, was available online.
But he added it would take another 300 years to make all the rest of the world’s information in all its forms available online.
"So we hope that in 300 years we will still be there to help people to navigate and search," he said earlier during a presentation before the interview.
He added during the interview that over 90 percent of the information being created today was in digital-friendly format.
Arora said one of his priorities in Europe was helping businesses understand how to better exploit the Internet.
He said he had noticed many corporate Web sites were underdeveloped.
"If you were a retailer today, a consumer electronics retailer in Europe, and I went to your Web site, you will find a picture of the CEO, the brand values, but as a consumer you cannot buy anything, which I find a little strange."
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