Despite the fact that we live in a text-driven web and video continues to heat up, (more than 80% of US internet audiences view online video, and YouTube’s fact sheet states 2 billion videos are being watched per day) images remain one of the core archetypes of viral content.
Whether infographics and data visualizations, webcomics like The Oatmeal or XKCD or even simple images quickly drawn up by someone trying to get a point across, images continue to be a prime, if underused content format.
Why?
- Images are quick and easy to share in real-time streams like Facebook and Twitter. They encourage it by design.
- Popular, influential communities such as Reddit love images – in fact to the point a user created an image service specifically for their network: Imgur (essentially by a Redditor, for Reddit but now used even wider).
- Videos aren’t scanable but images are and like text, they get their point across quickly.
- Images are essentially platform agnostic and easily work with any sharing tool or CMS.
So for your inspiration this week, I thought I’d aggregate 6 of my favorite image galleries created for The Future Buzz to encourage you to get more visual in both your web content and thinking:
50 Viral Images And How They Spread (2008, part 1)
50 Viral Images Part Two (2009, part 2)
50 Viral Images The Web Shared In 2009 (part 3)
50 Viral Images The Web Shared In 2010 (part 4)
50 Stunning Images From Flickr Under Creative Commons
50 Inspirational Images From Flickr Under Creative Commons (part 2)