Have Infographics Passed Their Use By Date?
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Have Infographics Passed Their Use By Date?

13th October 2011

I don’t know about you, but when I see a tweet highlighting that the link goes to an infographic I find myself less likely to click on the link.

12 months ago that was a different story, anything with the word ‘infographic’ in had sexy connotations of it being a data-filled masterpiece, heck I think I once tweeted an infographic about how tea is grown – and I’ve been an exclusive coffee drinker for as long as I can remember!

Due to the overuse and low-quality production of infographics, the success of infographics is starting to get undermined. They’re also one of the most blatant forms of link bait kicking around, which I believe gives it a counter-productive effect on attracting links and shares, as it’s too obvious that the sole purpose of the infographic is to get links and shares. Although, maybe that’s just because i’m ‘in the know’.

I wasn’t sure if it was just me or not who felt like this, so I asked on Twitter what people thought about the effectiveness of infographics.

So what do the trends say?

We all remember Digg in 2010 – you could visit the site at any time of the day and the home page would be at least half full of infographics. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case, yesterday the Digg home page featured just one infographic.
On the contrary, Google trends suggests that the popularity of infographics as a search term continues to grow and grow.

I also noticed that the Wikipedia page on infographics ranks high up in Google for the search term ‘infographic’, so I decided to look at the Wikipedia article traffic stats, which suggest that traffic has almost doubled over the past year to that page, although this is assuming that the rankings have remained consistent.

What do you think? Do infographics still work or are they fizzling out? Vote in the poll here: http://twtpoll.com/vpjopo

Written By
Marcus Taylor is the founder of Venture Harbour, a company that specialises in digital marketing for the music, film, and game industries.
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