User-generated content statistics & facts

What is user-generated content?

User-generated content, or UGC, is any content created by ordinary people rather than by brands, publishers or professional studios. It covers social media posts, videos on YouTube and TikTok, Reddit threads, Wikipedia articles, product reviews, photos of purchases, games built on Roblox and answers on question-and-answer sites. Much of the modern internet is built on it: the largest platforms do not make most of what their users see, they host and rank what their users make.

UGC has also become big business. Reddit, which runs almost entirely on posts and comments from its users, earned 2.2 billion dollars in revenue in 2025. Roblox paid its creators about 1.5 billion dollars the same year. YouTube says it paid creators, artists and media companies more than 100 billion dollars over four years. And for shoppers, reviews and photos from other customers are now among the most trusted sources of information. This report sets out the data on the platforms, the creators, the consumers who rely on UGC, the brands that use it, and the challenge that generative AI poses to it. For a sense of the raw volume of content created online, see our data on user-generated content uploaded every minute.

The main types of user-generated content

User-generated content comes in many forms, and each plays a different role online. Social posts and short videos on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X make up the largest volume of content and drive most of the time people spend on social media. Long-form video, led by YouTube, has created a class of professional creators whose channels rival television networks. Discussion forums and communities, such as Reddit, Discord servers and specialist message boards, hold detailed conversations and advice on almost every subject. Reference content such as Wikipedia and question-and-answer sites captures collective knowledge. Reviews, ratings and customer photos on retail sites and review platforms shape purchase decisions. And interactive UGC, from Roblox games to Minecraft servers and game mods, turns players into developers.

What unites these forms is that the platform provides the tools, distribution and audience, while users provide the content. Platforms earn money mainly through advertising placed around that content, through commissions on sales, or through subscriptions, and increasingly by sharing part of that money with the creators who draw the audience.

Reddit: turning conversations into revenue

Reddit is the clearest example of a business built entirely on user contributions. Its communities, known as subreddits, are created and moderated by volunteers, and every post and comment is written by users. After listing on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024, Reddit has grown rapidly. Revenue rose from 804 million dollars in 2023 to 1.3 billion in 2024 and 2.2 billion in 2025, and the company turned from a net loss of 484 million dollars in 2024 to a net profit of 530 million dollars in 2025.

Almost tripled in two years: Reddit revenue rose from 0.80 billion dollars in 2023 to 2.2 billion in 2025, driven by advertising.

Growth has continued in 2026. In the second quarter of 2026, Reddit revenue rose 61 percent to 805 million dollars, of which 762 million came from advertising and 43 million from other sources, mainly licensing its data to AI companies such as Google and OpenAI. Net income more than doubled to 253 million dollars, and the company guided to revenue of 860 to 870 million dollars in the third quarter. Reddit content also appears prominently in Google search results and in AI answers, which has brought millions of new visitors to the site.

Who uses Reddit

Reddit had 130.3 million daily active uniques worldwide in the second quarter of 2026, up 18 percent year on year, and 514.6 million weekly active uniques, up 24 percent. Most of the growth came from outside the United States, helped by machine translation that makes English-language discussions readable in other languages.

International majority: 77.1 million of the 130.3 million daily users of Reddit were outside the US in the second quarter of 2026.

Users in the United States are far more valuable to advertisers: average revenue per user was 11.85 dollars in the US in the second quarter of 2026, compared with 2.26 dollars internationally. US daily users stood at 53.2 million, and the company has faced questions from investors about slowing growth among logged-in US users as more people arrive through search and AI. The pattern shows a central tension for UGC platforms: they depend on search engines and AI tools for new visitors, while those same tools increasingly answer questions using platform content without sending users to the site.

Roblox: games made by users

Roblox takes user-generated content beyond text and video. Almost every game on the platform is built by its users, from teenagers learning to code to professional studios. Creators earn Robux, the virtual currency, when players spend in their games, and can convert them into real money through the Developer Exchange programme. Roblox paid creators about 923 million dollars in 2024 and about 1.5 billion dollars in 2025, and developer exchange fees reached 363 million dollars in the second quarter of 2026, up 15 percent. In the second quarter of 2026, Roblox had 123 million daily active users.

A winner-takes-most economy: the top 10 Roblox developers averaged 33.9 million dollars each, while the median creator in the payout programme earned 1,575 dollars.

The distribution of earnings is extremely unequal, as in most creator economies. More than 24,500 creators took part in the Developer Exchange programme, but the median participant earned just 1,575 dollars in 2024. The top 100 developers averaged 6 million dollars each and the top 1,000 averaged 820,000 dollars, up more than 570 percent since 2019. For a few studios, building on Roblox has become a large business; for most creators, it remains a hobby that pays small amounts.

The creator economy

The wider creator economy, in which individuals earn money from content they make and share, has grown into a major industry. Goldman Sachs estimated in 2023 that the creator economy was worth about 250 billion dollars and could reach 480 billion dollars by 2027, with the number of creators worldwide growing from about 50 million by 10 to 20 percent a year.

Heading for half a trillion: Goldman Sachs expects the creator economy to grow from about 250 billion dollars in 2023 to about 480 billion in 2027.

Only a small share of creators earn a living. Goldman Sachs estimated that just 4 percent of creators are professionals earning more than 100,000 dollars a year, and that brand deals account for around 70 percent of creator income, with the rest coming from platform revenue sharing, subscriptions and direct payments from fans. YouTube remains the largest payer: it says it paid more than 100 billion dollars to creators, artists and media companies in the four years to 2024. The biggest creators command audiences larger than many television networks, as shown in our overview of YouTube statistics.

YouTube: the biggest payer of creators

YouTube is the largest platform for video made by independent creators and the largest single source of creator income. The company said in September 2025 that it had paid more than 100 billion dollars to creators, artists and media companies over the previous four years, through its Partner Program, which shares advertising and subscription revenue with channel owners. YouTube earned about 40.4 billion dollars from advertising in 2025, according to WARC, and its short-form format, YouTube Shorts, now generates more than 200 billion views a day.

The platform has shifted the balance of power in entertainment. Many of the most-watched channels belong to individuals rather than studios, and YouTube has become the most-watched streaming service on television screens in the United States. Creators increasingly build businesses around their channels, selling merchandise, launching consumer brands and signing sponsorship deals worth millions of dollars. The size of the audience is shown in our data on the countries with the most YouTube users.

Social video and social commerce

On TikTok and Instagram, user-generated content and commerce are merging. TikTok Shop sold 64.3 billion dollars of goods worldwide in 2025, according to Momentum Works, and about 15.4 million creators promoted products through its affiliate programme in the United States alone, earning commissions on sales generated by their videos. Brands on TikTok earned a median engagement rate of 2.01 percent per video in 2026, far higher than on other platforms, according to Rival IQ, which is one reason marketers pay creators to make content in the native, user-made style of the platform.

This model pushes UGC to the centre of the marketing funnel. A single viral video from an ordinary user can sell out a product within days, and platforms reward content that feels authentic over content that looks like advertising. For brands, the challenge is to encourage genuine customer content while staying within advertising disclosure rules when creators are paid. Our overviews of Instagram and the largest social networks show where that content is published.

Reviews: the most trusted UGC

For shoppers, the most important form of user-generated content is the product review. In a PowerReviews survey of 8,153 US consumers in 2023, 99.75 percent of online shoppers said they read reviews at least sometimes, and 91 percent always or regularly did. 98 percent said reviews were essential when deciding to buy, and 45 percent said they would not buy a product with no reviews at all.

Reviews are essential: 98 percent of US online shoppers said reviews were essential to their purchase decisions, and 82 percent trusted them as much as recommendations from friends or family.

Reviews are trusted because they come from people with nothing to sell. In the same survey, 82 percent of shoppers said they trusted reviews as much as, or more than, recommendations from family and friends, and 91 percent said they trusted reviews when making purchase decisions. Shoppers also read reviews critically: 56 percent distrusted star ratings that came without written comments, and 78 percent read more reviews before buying expensive products. This is why retailers and brands work hard to collect reviews, and why fake reviews have become a major regulatory issue.

Customer photos and videos

Visual UGC, such as photos and videos that customers post of products they have bought, has become an important part of shopping online. PowerReviews found that 73 percent of US shoppers consider customer photos and videos when deciding what to buy, and 77 percent trust such visual content.

Seeing is believing: 77 percent of US shoppers said they trust customer photos and videos, and 73 percent consider them when making purchase decisions.

Social platforms have made this kind of content ubiquitous. Unboxing videos, try-on hauls and product demonstrations on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube act as reviews in video form, and brands increasingly repost them on their websites and in their ads. Hashtags can turn a single product into a trend overnight, as seen in our data on the top TikTok hashtags, and influencer posts blend UGC with paid promotion, as covered in our data on the most followed TikTok accounts.

How brands use UGC

Brands use user-generated content in three main ways. First, they display reviews, ratings and customer photos on product pages to build trust and increase conversion rates. Second, they run campaigns that invite customers to create content, such as hashtag challenges or photo contests, and then share the best entries. Third, they pay creators to produce content that looks and feels like organic UGC for use in advertising. This last category, often called UGC ads, has grown quickly because such videos tend to outperform polished studio ads on social platforms, where users are used to seeing content from ordinary people.

The rise of social commerce has blurred the line between UGC and advertising further. On TikTok Shop and Instagram, creators earn commissions on sales generated by their videos, turning product reviews into a sales channel. Marketers now treat UGC as a core part of their plans, as reflected in our data on the influence of social media marketing on businesses, the platforms marketers use and social media ad spend worldwide.

UGC and search

Search engines have turned towards user-generated content in recent years. As people added words such as reddit to their searches to find real opinions instead of optimised marketing pages, Google began to show more forum and discussion results. In February 2024 it signed a data licensing deal with Reddit, reported to be worth about 60 million dollars a year, giving it access to Reddit content for its AI models and search. Forum threads, reviews and short videos now appear prominently in results for product comparisons, travel questions and advice.

For brands, this has changed search strategy. Being mentioned positively in forums, reviews and creator videos matters more than before, because that content is what searchers, and increasingly AI assistants, draw on when recommending products. Many companies now monitor communities such as Reddit and respond to questions openly, and encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on the platforms where potential buyers look. At the same time, the growing value of UGC in search has attracted spam, with marketers posting disguised promotions in forums, and platforms have tightened rules to keep discussions genuine.

Moderation and trust

Hosting content made by millions of users brings responsibility for what they post. Platforms combine automated systems with human moderators to remove illegal content, harassment, misinformation and spam. Reddit relies heavily on volunteer moderators who run individual communities under its site-wide rules, while TikTok, YouTube and Meta employ large moderation teams and publish regular transparency reports, such as the data summarised in our report on TikTok accounts removed by reason.

Regulation is raising the bar. The European Digital Services Act requires the largest platforms to assess and reduce systemic risks, explain how their recommendation systems work and give users ways to appeal moderation decisions. The United Kingdom Online Safety Act imposes duties to protect children from harmful content. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission rule on fake reviews, adopted unanimously in August 2024, bans buying or selling fake reviews and testimonials, including those created with AI, as well as suppressing negative reviews and inflating social media indicators such as followers and views. For UGC to remain valuable, audiences need to be able to trust that it is real, and platforms are investing more in verification and labelling to protect that trust.

Wikipedia: the largest collaborative project

Wikipedia is the largest example of non-commercial user-generated content. By December 2025, the English Wikipedia had about 7 million articles and all language editions together had more than 66 million articles in 342 languages, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 600,000 people had edited Wikipedia in the previous 30 days, and edits were made at an average rate of 5.7 per second in 2024, although bots accounted for nearly 40 percent of all edits.

Wikipedia also illustrates how AI is changing the economics of UGC. Human page views fell by about 8 percent in October 2025 compared with a year earlier, as search engines and chatbots increasingly answer questions directly using Wikipedia content, while automated traffic from bots and AI crawlers reached more than 88 billion page views in 2025. Wikipedia relies on volunteers and donations rather than advertising, but fewer human visits could mean fewer new editors and donors over time.

Generative AI and the future of UGC

Generative AI is both the biggest threat and the newest customer for user-generated content. Large language models were trained on vast amounts of UGC from sites such as Reddit, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, and AI assistants now answer many of the questions people once posted to forums. Stack Overflow, the question-and-answer site for programmers, is the starkest example: monthly questions, which peaked at around 200,000 in 2014, had fallen to levels last seen when the site launched in 2009 by May 2025, after ChatGPT became widely used by developers.

At the same time, UGC platforms have found a new source of revenue by licensing their content to AI companies. Reddit signed data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI in 2024, and its other revenue, mostly from such agreements, was 43 million dollars in the second quarter of 2026. Consumers are also turning to AI when they shop: in a 2025 Bazaarvoice survey of more than 7,000 consumers in six countries, almost one in four said they had used a generative AI tool instead of a search engine, rising to 41 percent among 18 to 34 year olds, and those AI tools often summarise customer reviews. The growth of these tools is tracked in our data on generative AI users worldwide.

AI also creates new risks. Generative tools make it easy to produce fake reviews, fake photos and synthetic videos at scale, which threatens the trust that makes UGC valuable. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission adopted a rule in 2024 that bans fake reviews and testimonials, including those generated by AI, and allows civil penalties against businesses that buy or sell them. The European Union requires large platforms to tackle illegal and deceptive content under its Digital Services Act. For platforms and brands, keeping UGC authentic is becoming as important as collecting it.

The future of user-generated content

User-generated content remains the foundation of the social internet. The largest platforms are growing, creators are earning more than ever in total, and shoppers trust reviews and customer photos more than almost any other source. At the same time, the economics are shifting. AI assistants are absorbing some of the traffic that used to flow to forums and wikis, platforms are selling their content to AI companies, and the line between authentic UGC and paid or synthetic content is getting harder to see. The platforms that thrive will be those that keep real people creating, and give audiences reasons to trust what they see. Our overviews of social media, the biggest social media platforms and social network users worldwide provide wider context.

User-generated content in numbers

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