The recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook still hitting waves all around the web as people are finding it hard to calm down from this incredible journey to success story and while more pieces of information are slowly being revealed. Unfortunately, some websites and blogs are using it wrongfully…
I was reading in a few blogs this week, that “many” of Instagram users are intending to leave the social photo-sharing service after the acquisition. Some even put up graphs, charts or whatever to show the dissatisfaction and “leaving rates” of users. I still get surprised sometimes from what bloggers would do for some extra pageviews…
Don’t get me wrong, the claim that Instagram actually losing significant amount of loyal users after being acquired is legitimate by itself. That is, if indeed you can establish this claim by, well, something. I am not a journalist, just a humble blogger. But there are some values that applied for both blogging and journalism.
If you want to attack a story from a different angle and write an OPINION or an ASSUMPTION about how Instagram may now go down, it is more than okay and in fact it can be really insightful and educative to read an alternative point of view, as long as you are EMPHASIZING that it is an opinion or assumption.
And so, if you don’t have this “something” (proof, data, stats, inside source) then at least restrict what you are writing, even in just a few words like: “In my opinion…”, “I think…”, “I’m estimating/projecting/predicting/assuming…”. Those few extra words have a lot of meaning.
The problems begins when blogs are beginning to distort the truth for pageviews.
To use vague headlines like “Many Instagram Users Already Heading for the Exits” (real headline from a very popular blog) just to attract visitors without any real basis is the cheapest maneuver or stunt just to make people enter your site and (hopefully) to click on ads.
In that post with vague headline (I’m refusing to link to this post, you’ll have to find it yourself), the actual content of the post doesn’t even really related to the headline! It mostly “discusses” about Instagram third-party APIs and doesn’t even manage to deliver this point efficiently.
As it indeed eventually turned out, not only that many Instagram users WEREN’T heading for the exists but the photo sharing service actually had an amazing week in terms of users growth- For a short while it became the number one free app on the App Store while its user-base has grown by 10 million reaching for 40 million!
“Exits”? “Entrances” seems more like it.
Journalists are working hard to find real evidences/facts to publish a REAL story where at the same time arrives Mr. blog and takes twice as much pageviews with a twisted version of the story. Many fellows at the traditional press hate bloggers just because these kind of reasons.
After reading some of these posts this week, I can’t really blame them.