Paul White
You will see, if you can be bothered to look, my posts here on Virily are infrequent.
This is not because I dislike Virily, far from it. I enjoy posting when I am able.
The keyword being ‘Able’.
You see, I have tried on numerous occasions to create a post, but find my blogs too long, or too large, for Virily to accept. (i.e. Over 7000 characters.)
This is where I often struggle.
Reducing the size of my blogs would be counterproductive and devalue their content.
The whole development of social media engagement is now directed towards high-quality content. It is, according to the market leaders and major internet companies, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, the way forward for marketing, promotions and social engagement for the foreseeable future.
The current batch of key phrases includes ‘Emerging reach‘, ‘Fundamental Shifts‘ and ‘Consumer Personalisation’.
Don’t simply take my word for this, Google it, check out what the world is saying yourself.
I know Virily is relatively new and was lucky enough to be able to take full advantage when Niume, the world’s first collaborative blogging platform, stopped paying its contributors… a suicidal move which soon saw its demise.
I was a contributor and an early member of Numie, transferring to Virily during this debacle.
However, it seems that Virily is sitting on their digital laurels and are not focused on the ever-increasing speed of change of worldwide communications.
Unless Virily moves quickly to increase the quality of their content, which includes extending the word count of each submission, they will no doubt be left in the wake of those who are moving and will be smothered by the development of those new platforms.
TikToc, Facebook and even good old Instagram have introduced new ways to communicate including the introduction of ‘stories‘, which will be a major social media communications shift throughout 2020… see my predictions and forecasts about that HERE.
The whole future emphasis is on creating high quality, informative, engaging articles which compel response is something Virily is now desperately lagging behind with, if not completely missing.
Fine, if Virily wishes to carry on as they are, then they will become nothing more than another type of Quora, maybe one with more pictures and images, but shall be considered in the same derisory category.
So far, luck and timing have been on Virily’s side, but that is slipping away fast. I say to Virily, make your moves now or lose now. Otherwise, you will find yourself obsolete very, very, soon.
I was not wrong in my predictions of the Numie collapse, some 12 months or so prior.
Neither am I wrong with this statement.
The question is, will Virily take note. Personally, I doubt it, as their communication with their consumer is rated as one of the lowest, lingering at the bottom of the chart.
It will be a shame if changes are not forthcoming… quickly but I guess all we can do is wait and see.
Your point on quality content is an interesting one, because that was certainly my intention when I started with Virily about three years ago. If I look back at my old posts I can find a good number that I would like to think were of a decent quality – but the comments they got were few and far between.
The temptation, therefore, was to write more “chatty” pieces and acquire Virils at a faster rate than was possible with the “quality” ones.
Another big disincentive was the removal of Virils for non-member views. I used to publicise my longer Virily articles on Twitter and reap the reward that came from having a large number of followers. If Virily were to go back to the old arrangement I would gladly write more “quality” pieces and let my 77K followers know about them!
By the way, I reserve my better pieces for HubPages these days – a site that does lay down quality standards for contributions by its members.
As a workaround, but you can also lose readers like that. It would be far better to have room to say it all in one go.
As I have said for years now, we must have communication. Period.
I cannot agree more.
I agree with Doc Anderson……………
He’s not a bad lad to agree with!
I suspect there is a middle ground Paul, that would encompass much more. Most writers are not as prolific as you are.
The question becomes what does the market want. Right now, the market is split.
I think it is just a wave, a ripple of adjustment before a seismic shift. Maybe the ‘coming of age’ for social on the web?
i added your ask in the community poll I put up today. I think it is a fair ask. They could just add a new template (jumbo story) and allow it to have 10,000 characters even 15,000 characters.
Thanks, Doc. It will be interesting to see what they say.
honestly, they will not say anything./
I find that at the moment polls short but informative are very popular and when I can I do try to write up longer articles which hopefully will be of interest to others. Otherwise, you are right I find more and more posts with just a couple of short sentences and a photo. We do have very talented people here who do offer much more and of course like myself create interesting and informative quizzes
You have it. I get annoyed with those posts, a few uninspiring lines, the odd (not very good) photo. I want something to grab me, to spark an interest or intrigue. I enjoy a quizz if it has some ‘body’ to it, I am not a fan of ‘polls’ though. I feel they are often used as a replacement for content of structure.
Polls are popular because they “pay” at a higher rate than “stories”. If you have a quick piece to write, and can think of a simple poll question to go with it, why not do so and earn double the Virils for submitting it (30 instead of 15) and 5 instead of 3 for every comment? As things stand, you’d be a fool not to!