2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs

http://dendory.net/blog.php?id=5116e01b

by dendory • 13 years ago

82 35 13 years ago

dendory.net

arthulia• 13 years ago

Aren't social networks just sort of like... blog networks?

guscost• 13 years ago

More like sharecropping networks.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

Sort of. But one nice thing about blogs; "social networks" seem to encourage extremely brief snippets. While blogs are not the champion of long-form high quality content, they tend to be a step above social networks in terms of written content IMO.

jseliger• 13 years ago

>I think in 2013 and beyond we will see social media spending go up, but we will also see a big shift from Facebook and Twitter back towards blogs as influencers

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."

cwharland• 13 years ago

It's not at all clear that advertising on a blog will increase sales just because blogs are influential in the buying process. If I read a blog post that is an honest, unbiased review of a product it will likely contribute greatly to a decision to buy that product. But the power of the blog's suggestion had little to do with the fact that it was a blog and a lot to do with the fact that they were not paid to review.

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.

rednukleus• 13 years ago

Agreed. Furthermore, from personal experience I have clicked on adverts on search engines a number of times, but I don't remember ever clicking on a link on a blog post.

On a side note, where are you finding reviews that are "honest and unbiased"? I find them them pretty rare

potatolicious• 13 years ago

Oh goody. Maybe it will spell the end of the "you should follow me on Twitter" imperative at the end of every blog post on every blog everywhere.

paulgb• 13 years ago

I sure hope so. Nothing shouts "I don't understand A/B testing so I'll just use Dustin Curtis' result" louder than that sign-off.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

I always thought it conveyed more of "blogging is not my livelihood but some people think this is the best and I don't have time to find out so I'll use it."

gnosis• 13 years ago

Any move towards a decentralized system that is harder to track and spy on would have my support.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

IMO popular mainstream consumption, and being difficult to track/spy, are at odds. If everybody and their brother reads what you write, I can't think of any way it could simultaneously be difficult for the Feds to follow it too.

pemulis• 13 years ago

You also have to think about tracking on the readers' side of things. If you read something on Facebook or Google+, you can count on that being tracked and added to that system's profile of you. If you read something on a blog, and block things like Google Analytics, it's harder to passively track.

dmor• 13 years ago

I agree, this trend is a big part of how we are thinking about the future of Referly

rikacomet• 13 years ago

Hmm, I can bet against both of them :P

arctangent• 13 years ago

I'm not very convinced by the analysis presented in this post, but it seems fairly clear to me that at some point in the (near?) future people will start to think of social web services as more of a commodity rather than some big shiny gold rush that we all have to be part of.

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.

calinet6• 13 years ago

s/2013/2012/

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

About half my posts to twitter, g+, and FB are just links back to my blog. I may spend 30 minutes writing a blog article, then 1 minute posting links to my own site. I also post short things that I hope people will enjoy, but most of my effort goes to blogging or writing books.

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.

cincinnatus• 13 years ago

There is a big difference between blogs, corporate blogs, and blog advertising. The author is conflating the three and drawing a bogus conclusion.

brandnewlow• 13 years ago

Agreed. Does that "social media spend" slice describe how much the brands were spending on advertising on blogs/fb/twitter or how much they had spent on creating content for blogs/fb/twitter. The graphic implies the former but the author assumes the latter and goes from there.

adventured• 13 years ago

This effect exists due to the very nature of blogs, which the author seems to fail to take into account.

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).

derefr2• 13 years ago

It seems to me that a centralized blogging platform[1], that did its own analytics on the people browsing each blog, but also had enough information about each blogger's identity (perhaps through API access to their Facebooks, Twitters, G+s &c) to determine their likely audience, would be able to do very good with ad sales and placement, perhaps much better than Facebook itself (because if you're looking at Bob's wall, you aren't in a buying mood, but if you're looking at Bob's review of something on his blog, you are.)

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.

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

>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 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.

shortformblog• 13 years ago

This is a pretty weak pitch. Basically the person takes two sets of stats and creates an argument that isn't necessarily grounded in reality. The stats don't correlate, nor do they consider what end users are going to do.

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.

tomkarlo• 13 years ago

The analysis ignores that as a company, you spend budget on buying Facebook ads. That's in addition to the money you spend directly maintaining your FB and blog. The fact that a larger percentage of budgets are going to FB just tells you that's where companies spend money to attract new eyeballs to both their FB page and their blog - most of the companies I follow on FB primarily post links to their blogs.

pekk• 13 years ago

It's arguably not that interesting to consider oscillation between these two things because basically it's the same problem under two names. There's a pretty large amount of fungibility among a 90s .edu home page, a geocities home page, a Wordpress instance, highly-customized Myspace or Tumblr.

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)?

Stratoscope• 13 years ago

The broken-out slice of the pie chart is badly distorted.

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:

http://junkcharts.typepad.com/

zdmc• 13 years ago

I tend to use Facebook as a social blog already. It's "free" hosting (oh, I know: I am the product), and many of my friends are coerced to view my musings (if they want to see their news feed).

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...

Agathos• 13 years ago

Blogs sell display ads which are part of the big 41% slice of the pie chart. The smaller ones sell space entirely through AdWords--I think that's in the 41% as well, but I'm not sure.

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?

coditor• 13 years ago

My blog gets plenty of readers but I refuse to make any money off of it. Maybe I'm out of touch with that reality.

jh3• 13 years ago

The only type of ads I think look good on blogs are the ones from networks such as http://decknetwork.net and http://carbonads.net

Why do you refuse to make money with your blog?

thomasrambaud• 13 years ago

You mean, like what started in 2012 ?

Social networks are know widely known, meaning they became boring and non-innovations.

2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs

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