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The latest digital trend has a lot of names: social networking, connection marketing, social media, social marketing, citizen publishing ... the list goes on. However, while the digital market has yet to decide on the exact terminology for the growing phenomenon of user-generated content sites, there's no denying that it matters.

The last two years have seen the meteoric rise of companies such as YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia, from relative obscurity to rank among the world's most visited sites. Their unprecedented growth is witnessed in the staggering amount of traffic they receive.

According to AC Nielsen, traffic to MySpace is growing by 300 per cent a year. It has 105 million users, with 250,000-plus new profiles being created every day. Social networking site Piczo was the fastest-growing brand site in the UK last year and has more than 10 million users worldwide, with four million in the UK alone. Meanwhile, video-sharing site YouTube sees users watching more than 100 million clips every day.

These web sites have heralded a dramatic shift in the online publishing world. It has moved from a traditional publishing model, where content was made for audiences by publishing companies, to these audiences creating their own content and becoming publishers in their own right. In this sort of landscape, the new media barons are not Murdoch and Rothermere, but the unsuspecting founders of YouTube, and, sitting alongside them, the humble blogger or citizen publisher.

"We are seeing a lot more folks like us creating platforms that allow individuals to be the media publishers themselves," says Jay Stevens, vice-president of sales operations at MySpace UK. "What's really unique about sites like MySpace is that they really take full advantage of the internet to empower the user to become their own publisher. That's the really compelling part."

NATURAL EXTENSION

The phenomenon began in online chatrooms, where people met to talk. But, these quite fragmented spaces soon gave rise to instant messaging and online forums, and brands got in on the act with dedicated spaces for feedback on their own sites. Blogging was perhaps the natural extension of this; a space for individuals to post their musings and day-to-day thoughts as a web log. A new blog is created every minute somewhere around the globe - Nielsen BuzzMetrics monitors more then 30 million blogs and counting.

"We're seeing people creating a mass of content very easily," says Alistair Williams, marketing executive at Sulake, which owns Habbo Hotel, an online virtual world where users can create characters and spaces to interact with others. Habbo currently has 41 million users.

"People who started making personal web sites were prohibited by software, but now you can cut and paste content into blogs or MySpace and that has led to an exponential growth in the amount of content," says Williams.

He believes this "makes everyone a publisher" and means that the traditional publishers are competing with every other publisher for people's time.

This has lead to a "massive shift in the landscape" and, wherever audiences are moving, brands and marketers will have to follow.

Williams sees a number of ways in which brands can jump on board, but they must be relevant and add value to the user experience to succeed. In Habbo Hotel, for example, brands can run themed campaigns and host virtual events. "In Habbo, we can incorporate brands into the community, but it has to be relevant. I've no idea how something like Wikipedia would get a brand involved; it just wouldn't make sense," says Williams.

MySpace offers bespoke communities where a brand can create their own profile and 'space', and communicate with fans. Stevens explains: "This is their place within the network where they can identify who their biggest brand champions are and maintain an ongoing communication with them." He thinks it is important for advertisers to look at the amount of time people spend online: "There is an inordinate amount of people's time going on social networking sites. Advertisers have to take advantage of this massive growth."

BRAND CHAMPIONS

The idea of brands using MySpace is becoming more popular, and with users too. There are currently more than 60 active brand communities on MySpace with a lifespan of between one month to a year or more, depending on the campaign.

"Smart brands say 'I want to create a community - it's the place where I can identify my biggest brand champions and maintain dialogue with them on an ongoing basis'," says Stevens. "These brands constantly refresh their community and put up new entertainment and new elements, which keep the audience engaged and, in turn, the audience goes out and evangelises the brand on their behalf."

The MySpace brand sites are hugely popular with users who 'make friends' with the space by choosing to link themselves with the brand. Some even download branded backgrounds and images on to their own spaces. Successful brand spaces include the X-Men film space, which attracted 3.1 million friends, while My Name is Earl notched up 67,193, Adidas Soccer 59,264 and Honda Element 43,097. People even posted images of themselves in their cars on the Honda space.

"With branded communities, we are giving a platform for brands to engage, interact and create a dialogue with their customers, instead of simply throwing ads at them until they just simply go and buy something," says Stevens.

Jeremy Verba, chief executive officer of Piczo - "the biggest social networking site you've never heard of" - says that if audiences and brands are embracing social networking sites, traditional publishers and media companies will need to catch up. "Primarily, it's important to note that it's not a fad. It is here to stay, and mainstream media companies should embrace social networking because it's a great model," says Verba.

According to Verba, while there are a lot of costs involved in creating content for traditional media, social-networking sites rely on user-generated content so they are an obvious cost saver. And, these sites rely on strong word-of-mouth and viral marketing, providing another cost-saver for companies.

GREAT MODEL

"User-generated content is doing the marketing for us," says Verba. "It is true viral growth and means that all you need to do as a marketer is stay ahead of the curve," says Verba. "It really is a great media model.

I think media companies will embrace it because it makes good media sense."

He believes firms that combine and overlay new technology with traditional media, in the same way that MTV has done with MTV Flux, will do exceptionally well in the new media landscape. "The rise of new media doesn't project the death of old media. There is a lot of room for successful extensions."

Andrew Hart, managing director of AN Digital, agrees. The digital publishing division of Associated Newspapers has more than 85 sites and reaches 26 per cent of the UK online population, receiving more than seven million unique users a month.

Hart believes the growing number of social-networking sites and the sheer amount of available content online makes traditional publishing companies more essential than ever. "In this world of ever more confusing information, you need professional editors. I see this as a wonderful opportunity for traditional brands to make sense of it all," he says.

"With so many web sites and so much information, audiences need interpretation, and the role of big media brands really comes to the fore in this environment.

In the same way that brands summarise the news now, they can do the same online with citizen journalism, blogging and traditional news sources," he adds.

Hart believes examples of services like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, which use individuals' knowledge to provide the content, are the way forward for publishers. Over the next five years, he believes there will be a massive challenge to traditional publishers, which will need to look at how to aggregate all this content into accountable and useful forms, while maintaining their quality and reputation.

With so much content out there, users need filters to distinguish what is relevant and useful to them. Julian Smith, insight and research director at MEC Interaction, says traditional publishers can do that. "We are in a state of flux at the moment and everyone is having to adjust to disruptive technologies. There is still a job to be done to aggregate, filter and bring all the good stuff to the top."

Smith suggests publishers can strengthen their brands by helping users to sift through all the content online, which will also help advertisers align themselves with relevant services. "Someone needs to filter through the chatter and bring the best stuff to the fore. As there is so much out there, we need filters and traditional media brands can do that job," he adds. "There is still a role for traditional media and people will continue to look to those brands to make sense of it all."

THE NEW PUBLISHING POWERHOUSES

MYSPACE.COM

Founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003, the networking phenomenon boasts 105 million global users and it is growing by 250,000 a day. It is home to profiles for individuals, as well as film-makers and musicians.

It is the fourth most-visited English language site in the world after Yahoo, MSN and Google. According to ComScore Media Metrix, MySpace UK attracted 5.17 million users and over 1.7 billion page views in July.

Last year, NewsCorp bought the site and has struck a four-year deal with Google to power searches, guaranteeing over £480m in shared revenue.

It seems Anderson and DeWolfe are already major power brokers.

YOUTUBE.COM

One of the fastest-growing web sites, the video-sharing property is the 18th most popular site. Founded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in 2005, the last 18 months the site has had a storm of attention, attracting close to 20 million visitors a month, (Nielsen//NetRatings). Each day, its visitors watch more than 100 million clips and an additional 65,000 new videos are uploaded every 24 hours. The clips vary from homemade videos to TV shows, music, films and ads. Agencies around the world have taken to seeding viral campaigns on YouTube, like Subway by Agency.com. All accounts suggest Chen and Hurley are unlikely media barons, unfazed by the huge empire they have created.

FLICKR.COM

Flickr is far and away the most popular photo-sharing web site. It was created by Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004 and then brought by Yahoo in 2005 giving the small community site a massive boost. The site now boasts user numbers of 2.5 million and has morphed into an "innovative" community platform, and is used by individuals to share photos and tag them so they can be found by web browsers. Flickr is especially favoured by bloggers who use the site as a photo repository for their shots.

HABBOHOTEL.COM

While not strictly a social networking web site, Habbo makes the list for being a precursor to the current social community rage. With hotels in 19 countries and 41 million users, Habbo Hotel is a virtual world in which teenagers can chat and express themselves safely. The original concept was created by Finnish partners Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrola back in 1999, but the company was sold to Sulake and the first Habbo Hotel launched in 2000. Since then, Habbo has expanded across the world. The American version is the largest of the global properties and also serves as an international hotel, attracting 1.3 million unique users a month.

BLOGGER.COM

There are millions of blogs floating around cyberspace and this is largely due to Blogger, the weblog publishing system. Launched in 1999 by PyraLab, it was one of the first blog-publishing tools on the market, and it went on - with blogging - to dramatically change the web publishing environment. Blogger made online publishing as easy as word-processing and it became a huge hit. Nowadays you can't move online without stumbling on a blog. Nielsen Buzz Metrics monitors more than 30 million of them and provides its own blog, blogpulse, to discuss them. Blogger.com is now owned by Google, following the search giant's purchase of PyraLab in 2003.

WIKIPEDIA.ORG

The web-based free content encyclopedia began in 2001 as an English-language project. Created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, the web site is a non-profit service that allows users to post articles, which can be changed and added to by other users. According to Wikipedia, the name comes from the term 'wiki', which means a web site that allows any visitor to freely edit its content. The site currently contains more than five million articles in a number of languages and is the 16th most-popular site in the world. It is often graced with the title of providing 'true user-generated content' and it is seen as a stellar example of web 2.0.

DIGGIT.COM

Diggit is a news web site that employs user-ranking systems to determine the placement of information within it. This information ranges from news, web sites to video footage from YouTube or Google Video. Diggit currently has more than 500,000 registered users; a huge leap on the previous year when the number was 17,000. As of May 2006, Diggit has been attracting 8.5 million unique visitors and routinely sees 3,000-plus new story submissions a day. The site was created in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky and company CEO Jay Adelson.