A Work in Progress - Publishing Rough Draft
Take a Chace & Make Copyright Content Free
Youtube won a lot of distribution through viral syndication. They didn't care too much about what was published, just that it hopefully drew eyeballs and that some of it would get syndicated, building YouTube into a destination. The gravity and momentum that created (along with a loophole in the DMCA policy that allows them to host copyright work) built a self-policing community and lead to a $1.65 billion buyout by Google. Not bad for a company that relied entirely on user generated content.
And while Google is still trying to figure out video monetization, they keep adding filters to boost relevancy based on user feedback and now they even have a filter which allows you to sort exclusively through partner content.
Start With a Stub
Wikipedia allows anyone to start a stub and start adding content to it. The stub acts as an advertisement to be improved, and so many people iteratively improve the work in progress to something of value. As topics become heated and/or get frequently vandalized the permissions can be changed.
The key to Wikipedia's growth was the work in progress approach to filtering which allows constant low cost improvement.
A Mechanical & Commercial Example
Mahalo, upon launch, was a pretty bad idea. But they iterated, and now they have featured content on popular topics which pulls in enough link equity to help their other pages rank. Some of their worse pages have been highlighted as spam (by me, no less!), but they have stubs that allow users to contribute to pages until there is enough content / meat there to call it a page. Once they get enough meat on the page they allow it to get indexed in search engines.
By calling their project human powered search they can essentially go after any high paying keyword area. And by calling it a search engine they can go after even keywords that are vile / disgusting.
Jason Calacanis does all their public relations work, then they have paid full time employees, then they have underpaid part time guides, and they are further improved through third parties suggesting links, content, & topic ideas.
The part time guides and review system work well because web content is generally quite poor, and they have pricing based on expected return - which allows them to focus on guaranteeing results. Their how to content goes from $50 to $250 a page, while the more basic content where there is less competition goes from $5 to $15 a page.
Their how to content is published with lots of headings, whitespace, and ordered lists, which helps make it look more valuable than it is because it is so easy to consume.
Publish Then Filter
In Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody he highlights the value of publishing then using filters to make sense of the chaos. It is not the most efficient system, but the key is to start with an idea...a YouTube, a Meetup, a Wikipedia, a Squidoo, a Flickr, a Twitter, or a Mahalo. Reward good content & boost egos while creating filters to filter out the garbage. Keep iterating until you have something of value.
