2013 will see a shift from social networks back to blogs

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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)?