Overtaken

It’s finally happened.
Readers of The Huffington Post website now outnumber (by a lot) the readers of The Washington Post.
Well, no big deal you might think, just another battle between publishers, if it weren’t for the fact that The Huffington Post is a blog, created and managed by Arianna Huffington.
In the past year, the Huffington blog has increased its reader population 26% to the dizzy figure of 9.4 million single readers, while that same period saw the number of The Washington Post readers plunge 29% to 9.2 million.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Inevitably.
Convergence is everywhere. It has never been so easy to reach such a vast audience, the problem is interacting with the audience you’ve captured.
And this is the change on which everything hinges, because it has an impact on the way people behave. (People meaning us, me who’s writing, you who’s reading, who wants to voice your thoughts and get some feedback, who wants to be treated as a person and as a client…).
Some data to highlight the trend underway:
- In America, the reader count of printed daily newspapers has plummeted more than 7 million, while the number of online blog readers has swelled to 30 million.
- In the past two months, the number of videos uploaded to You Tube surpassed the total number of program hours broadcast by American TV stations 7 days a week since 1948!
- About 10 million people visit the American information websites each month, while Facebook, My Space, and You Tube attract roughly 250 million visitors.
- Six years ago not even one of the three social networks just listed existed.
Now that’s what I call an uptrend!