2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs
dendory.net
dendory.net
The slice is broken up into rings for each percentage, but the rings are sized by their width, not their area, so the areas are way off.
It says 57% Facebook. The width of the entire slice is 500 pixels, and Facebook's width is about 285 pixels - that's 57% of the width. But the area of the Facebook ring is obviously much greater than 57% of the entire slice.
In fact, since the area varies with the square of the radius, the inner rings all combined (43%) are only 18.5% of the area, and the Facebook ring is 81.5% of the area!
Or consider the two slices that are supposed to represent 13% each. The inner blue slice is 6.37% of the total area, and the red slice next to it is 8.88%. That's 40% bigger than the other slice that is supposed to represent the same amount.
Using widths that give correct areas would be misleading visually too, because the widths would then look wrong. Facebook's 57% would be only 34% of the width, and the inner rings combined would be 66% of the width.
I think the only way to fix this and stick with the pie representation would be to make the sections angles of the slice instead of rings within it.
For anyone who wants to make better charts by learning what not to do, I recommend the Junk Charts blog which picks apart all sorts of bad charts. I've learned a lot from it and it's entertaining too:
Maybe then we can stop throwing piles of money at people who want to build walled gardens and go back in the direction of people hosting their own content for others to peruse.
(Yes, I'm predicting the failure of Google+ as well as Facebook and all the other me-too services like mass photoblogging services and all that other crap.)
We've spent too much time and effort writing code to help people push their content into companies that will claim the right to own it. Let's make tools that help people express themselves in ways that benefit everyone and that ensure creators retain ownership of the work they create.
It got a lot of coverage here and elsewhere.
I don't meant to suggest nothing has changed. It's significant that the required technical knowledge has reduced and extraneous degrees of freedom have been removed and there are simple ways of discovering other users and their posts. It has democratized the personal page and mainstreamed something which used to be for arch-nerds. But everyone has done these things.
Most of the innovative activity of this Facebook/Twitter generation of sites seems to be in playing with different ways of locking people in (sorry: I mean being 'sticky'), getting more data and exploiting it better. Other than that, the competition seems to be mostly about marketing and network effect. These seem like continuous efforts not subject to much permanent advantage. Does anyone ever just win on this basis? Do we really imagine that it will still be Facebook and Twitter in 30 years (like Coke and McDonalds 30 years ago)?
If I'm reviewing simply to advertise then I lose a great deal of credibility and influence as far as the consumer is concerned. Advertising on blogs will simply shift them from the blog category to the retail or brand site category which may cost them influence.
On a side note, where are you finding reviews that are "honest and unbiased"? I find them them pretty rare
A blog is a great way to meet people with similar interests, which is the purported reason for social networks. Nothing wrong with people using social networks but for people who can manage their own site, that just seems like a better way to invest energy creating content.
Now, is there room for blogs to make a comeback? Yes. There are publishing networks big (Medium) and small (see all the Markdown+Dropbox blog platforms) that are gunning for WordPress and Tumblr right now, which suggests that we're going to find new ways to encourage movement on the medium-form writing style.
And here's the other thing: While blogs are more likely to influence a purchase than Facebook, any good marketer has presence on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs. That one percent difference is nullified if they have their hands in multiple pockets with multiple approaches.
A lot of what marketing clients look for is a top-down approach which takes into account each of the tools at our disposal and finds ways to make each of them work together. You can't treat one as more important than the other, though Facebook is certainly getting the lion's share of the attention right now. If anything, the second graphic in this post shows the value of a more holistic approach, not one that relies largely on one platform over another. If you're really doing it right, you're leveraging Twitter to lead someone to a blog post, getting them to watch your YouTube video, and drawing a like on a Facebook page all in a single visit … and the triangulation of these elements eventually leads to a sale and/or a growth of brand awareness.
In blogging you're talking about a very large number of individuals, most of whom are not likely going to be good at ad sales / management / placement. The blogging ecosystem is inherently chaotic, it'd be like herding cats trying to get blog based advertising up to the effectiveness of a singular organization of massive scale like Facebook.
Then you have a huge portion of the blogging world that is made up of corporate blogs, non-profit blogs, and so on and many of those simply will never have any interest in ad monetization.
To correct the imbalance would require a very large and efficient ad machine at the core of the blogging world, with the ability to determine placement and ad matching for every blog - that doesn't exist and never will. Slapping AdSense on a blog won't cut it (not to mention most blogs don't run any serious advertising and never will).
The only problem with this is putting ads on what people think of as "their" blog. People want to be able to run their own ads on "their" blogs; even if they're hosted with some other service, they want to be the ones making money off people seeing their own content on their own pages.
I think Tumblr might be closest to a solution here (though even they haven't grasped it yet): once you can get people to read the blogs you host through a centralized interface (their "dashboard", effectively an RSS reader), you can display ads beside/between/around those posts that you think are relevant to those posts--and because the viewer never ends up going to the blogger's site itself, the blogger doesn't feel slighted by the ads + lack of revenue. They're not showing up on their site, after all.
[1] You can debate the other pros and cons of centralized/decentralized blogging--there are many--but "makes enough money for the people doing the centralizing to offer blog-hosting as a free service, and blog consumption with a streamlined and enjoyable UX" is definitely one of the pros of centralization.
I don't see why that would be a problem. So you share the revenue with them, which the bloggers are happy to do because you're providing all the analytics and economies of scale they don't have right now.
And yet, if you say "well, we'll only give you your cut if-and-when you jump through all the legal hoops yourself so we can just send it without worrying or doing too much work", these people will get mad that you're withholding "their" money, move their blogs elsewhere, tell all their readers that you're stonewalling lazy moneygrubbers ("you're just like Paypal!" they'll say), etc.
I don't understand how "give us a routing number and we'll deposit the money into your checking account" is particularly arduous. If you live in a country that makes payments difficult, what do you expect a blogging platform to do about it? You'll encounter the same issue from any ad network who might pay you to put ads on your own unaffiliated blog. If you want that fixed you have to lobby your government to fix it, or move to another country.
In addition to that, Paypal has to deal with an army of international scammers and Paypal are cheap/lazy bastards who would rather screw over their users than devise elegant solutions to those problems. But almost all of those problems are a result of Paypal withdrawing money from one account and depositing it into another. A blogging platform doesn't do that: They get money from advertisers, who are happy when their ads are shown to users who buy stuff regardless of the are-you-a-dog status of individual bloggers, and deposit the money into the accounts that said bloggers have asked it to be deposited into. There is nowhere near the same opportunity to steal anyone else's money in the traditional method of signing up for a scam account and taking payments for goods or services you never intend to deliver, so the level of dickishness required to run the operation is substantially reduced.
I'm not convinced that blogs ever stopped being "influencers," especially given how much Google traffic goes to blogs. I suspect that whatever metrics dendory.net and others are using, however, have understated the impact of blogs and probably have for a long time.
I do think we've seen blogs shift: people with long-form aspirations write them. People who just want to post links and one-liners that are only likely to be of interest to a small circle of people use Facebook and so on.
Certainly I've spent a LOT more time writing blog posts than I've spent on Facebook, but I'm also anomalous in this respect.
EDIT: I should've just written, "I think companies are catching up to what most of us already know about the differences in purpose in both readership and writership between blogs and Facebook."
I'd really love for Facebook to integrate analytics into personal accounts. I know that they offer some functionality via "Pages", but I'd love to know what type of content that my readers (friends) are most interested in. Which links they follow, etc...
What I don't know is what constitutes blog spending under the category of social media. Running your own company's blog? Outreach and free stuff aimed at influential bloggers? Astroturfing?
Why do you refuse to make money with your blog?
Social networks are know widely known, meaning they became boring and non-innovations.