
2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs - dendory
http://dendory.net/blog.php?id=5116e01b
======
Stratoscope
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/>

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arctangent
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.

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potatolicious
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
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
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."

~~~
hyperbovine
I don't know anything about Dustin Curtis or A/B testing. Honestly, I always
just thought it was the author being an arrogant prick. Apologies to all the
authors whose character I impeached. Apparently, there was more to the story.

~~~
graeme
[http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter....](http://www.dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html)

It got a lot of coverage here and elsewhere.

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pekk
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)?

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

~~~
brandnewlow
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.

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cwharland
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
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

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
shortformblog
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.

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

~~~
sliverstorm
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
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.

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adventured
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).

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>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.

~~~
derefr
A lot of the people who _would_ be providing content for your blog-hosting
service (that is, blogging), aren't necessarily in a legal position to receive
money. 8-year-olds, for instance, or people living in countries where it is
terribly expensive to set up a bank account that can accept internatonal
payments, or even people staying in the US on Student visas who are obligated
to not earn any income while they're here.

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.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>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.

------
jseliger
>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."

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zdmc
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...

------
tomkarlo
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.

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Agathos
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
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
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?

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thomasrambaud
You mean, like what started in 2012 ?

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

------
rikacomet
Hmm, I can bet against both of them :P

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

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

~~~
guscost
More like sharecropping networks.

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calinet6
s/2013/2012/

