User-generated content (UGC), also known as user-created content (UCC), refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users who were once just passive content consumers. The advent of UCC marked a shift among various organizations from creating online content to providing facilities for amateurs to publish their own content. This active, participatory and creative audience is prevailing today, and its culture is in turn affecting communications all over our society.
Despite the changes that UCC culture has brought, the researches on UCC still remain in the early stage. The purpose of this study is to understand users’ motives for sharing UCC and to investigate influential factors on their sharing intentions. This study is composed of 2 essays and 1 appendix issue, and each one is following the situations that UCC website users would face.
First essay examines the factors that motivate users to produce and share UCC and how each motivation connects to their intention for quantitative sharing or qualitative sharing. As a result, five motives - self creation motive, community commitment motive, self-expression motive, community relatedness motive, and reward motive- are found to affect UCC sharing intention. And these motives were related to ‘quantitative contribution’ or to ‘qualitative contribution’ separately.
Second essay is dealt with the environmental factors which affect the UCC sharing intention while internet users search for the website to share contents. Among the environmental factors, this essay observes site member’s UCC quality gap (the UCC quality difference between site members and newcomer) and feedback types. The results show that the higher the quality of UCC, the higher the UCC reading intention of the newcomer’s. However, in the case where the intention is to engage in UCC sharing, the site where the gap in a newcomer’s and site members’ UCC quality is minimized will be selected. In the case wher...