Less is more ...

A recent post on HubPages described 7 things they did to beat their competitor Squidoo and make a case for “less is more”. The 7 things were all targeted to improving quality of articles published at HubPages which resulted in less content and thus initially caused a dip in their traffic but thereafter caused a sustainable rise. The results are not very surprising, high-quality product have for generations produced market leaders and established brands e.g. wikipedia, google, Indian software industry, and the likes. Noteworthy is the application of this principle to user-generated content. Sites try so hard to get users to contribute content that quite often quality takes a back seat. A good lesson to learn from this case study is, track both quality and quantity of content and encourage quality submissions from users, in the process you will not only add value but also build a brand.

In my opinion, three important questions follow:

a) How to measure quality of content.
b) How to encourage quality submissions
c) How to fix poor quality content

Some obvious ways to do the above:

Measuring Quality: by having users rate content; by text scoring algorithms (similar to techniques used by search engines); by measuring user behavior (such as click through rates, page views, etc.); and by factoring in search engine rankings.

Encouraging Quality: by displaying the quality score along with the number of people who liked or disliked the content; by ensuring quality and relevance both determine the content available for consumption; and by rewarding high-quality submissions.

Fixing Quality: by identifying content areas poor in quality and then using algorithms and humans to fix them.

In conclusion, the ways are not as important as the questions. If you are a site that thrives on user generated content, never stop asking the above three questions in addition to the one you always ask; how much content was contributed and how many users contributed it.