As most site owners do, I rely on content to sell my site on the Internet. I fully recognize the emerging trends of social or community sites such as FaceBook and Twitter attracting large audiences on the Internet. While I have been dabbling with how I can benefit by merging content and social media into a website, CMS Report remains mainly as a content site. If suddenly people lost interest in using the Internet to retrieve content then sites like mine would no longer have a reason to exist.
With the continued growth in social media sites is there a future for content sites and content management systems? As an article on CNET by Lance Whitney points out, apparently, the answer remains a resounding "yes".
The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.
In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.
Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com, MapQuest.com, and Edmunds.com.
This is good news for those of us that run mainly content websites. I am still fascinated by the use of social media for moving information to a wider audience and I will continue to experiment in that direction. But in my heart I know that my site can't truly compete as a social site with the very popular community sites that already exist today. I do though have unique content to offer through articles and blog postings that can't be found elsewhere on the Internet. It's good to know that with content still king there is a reason why sites like mine still have a future on the Internet.