...The digital landscape changes fast, and pictures are a main catalyst. Netscape released the first commercially available web browser in 1994, and fewer than 15 years later Flickr housed more than 6 billion photos -- that's more than 450 times the number of photos held by the Library of Congress. In 2009 more than 2.5 billion camera-enabled devices were in the hands of would-be photogs who, in the course of a year, produced 10 percent of all photos ever taken. Instagram -- the mobile photo-sharing app that Facebook bought earlier this year for $1 billion -- measures its customer engagement in uploads-per-second. Back in the quaint old days of December 2011 -- pre-acquisition and before comScore released data showing Instagram's daily usage is now greater than Twitter's -- that engagement was 60 uploads per second. By early 2012 Facebook members were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day to the site.
"This slurry of data signals the end of the Kodak Era where we took photos on birthdays and vacations and shared them only with a small group of friends," said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate and former SVP for Netscape's browser group. "We've now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word -- what some are calling the dawn of the 'imagesphere."...
Research from a team at Harvard Business School supports Malik's claim. A 2009 study finds that 70 PERCENT OF ALL ACTIVITY INSIDE SOCIAL NETWORKS REVOLVES AROUND PHOTOS. Keep in mind that the study was conducted in a time when Facebookers were uploading a mere 31 million photos a day, and MySpace was still relevant enough to be included in a study of social-media sites....
[I highly recommend this post for marketers, content pros and PR. It provides a very strong rationale for visual content in anything to do with the Internet. ~ Jeff]
Marty Smith's analysis will provide guidelines and spark new content marketing ideas.