The first time I heard of the concept of consumer generated content was at the AAAI Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs. I guess I had not been paying attention — I can see that it represents a sea change in the media. ClickZ News has an article on a recent Pew report on home broadband use that gives some figures:

Forty-eight million American adults have contributed some form of user-generated content on the Internet, it found. That’s 35 percent of Internet users. Of those adults who have posted content on the Web, 73 percent, or 31 million, have a broadband connection at home.

“[The Web is] shifting now to user-generated content; it shows people engaging with the Internet in a number of different ways in their lives,” said John Horrigan, associate director of research at Pew Internet & American Life Project. “It shows that people are pretty interested in using the technology to put something of themselves on the Internet, not just pull down information from the Internet.”
…
“There is an element of the Internet being the medium for creativity and the Internet being an outlet for creativity people bring to the Worldwide Web,” according to the report. It considers blogging, Web site creation, contribution of work on Web pages or blogs and submissions of artwork, photos, stories or videos as user-generated online content.

The Pew report on Home Broadband Adoption 2006 is available online free.

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