A new report from Nielsen/NetRatings adds to the quantifiable impact of blogging, in this case the ancilliary benefits generated by blogs. The organization reports that traffic to image hosting Web sites has skyrocketed due to the massive rise in blogging activity this year.
- As a category, image hosting sites have grown 406 percent to more than 14.7 million unique users since January 2005, accounting for nearly 10 percent of active U.S. Internet users.
- In July 2005, 20 percent of active Web users, or 29.3 million people, accessed blogging or blog-related Web sites, growing 31 percent since the beginning of the year.
While no business people (especially ones who derive revenue from digital images) would ignore these stats, they might question the applicability to business strategy when they learn that female teens between the ages of 12 to 17 years indexed the highest out of the age groups broken down by gender.
There’s an easy explanation for this demographic trend—social circles have moved on-line, web journals provide a great means for getting to know someone and teenage girls like to meet people—but companies that look beyond those demographic fine points will see the inherent power of the Internet as a social media and refine their Internet strategy appropriately.
The same social impulse that draws teenage girls to blogs sparks the mass collaboration that is capturing business interest and rewarding companies that learn to harness its power.
In a comprehensive article on the topic, Business Week, provides a number of statistics on how on-line collaboration impacts various industries, including:
- Telecom: More than 41 million people use Skype software to share processing power and bandwidth, allowing them to call each other for free over the Internet. Partly as a result, combined 2005 revenues of AT&T and MCI are expected to fall by $7.4 billion, or 15%.
- Media: Reversing the traditional broadcast model, more than 53 million Americans have contributed material to the Net, such as product reviews and blog postings. At least 10 million blogs, some drawing more visitors than mainstream news sites, are now read by 32 million Americans.
- Advertising: Search engine Google instantly polls millions of people and businesses whose Web sites link to each other, producing an entirely new ad venue that grossed $3.2 billion last year, up 118%. That compares with an 8% increase in TV ad spending and 5% in newspapers and magazines.
Mass collaboration challenges numerous business principles, notably the command-and-control structure instituted by most corporations. Not surprisingly, then, the early winners have been upstarts rather than established businesses.
Nonetheless, companies like Hewlett-Packard and Proctor & Gamble have tapped into the power of mass collaboration, learned to manage the social impulses of their customers and employees and generated solid business results through their efforts.
It’s a trend that all organizations will need to watch. Just like teenage girls are discovering that image-intensive web journals are a great way to meet people, organizations that harness the power of mass collaboration are becoming very popular in their own social scene.
