Social media has become so important and over recent years it has become a phenomenon which shows no signs of slowing down
Social media has become a massive part of the general public means to lifestyle choices; news and new technology are just a few things offered by this new social movement.
But as the famous saying goes “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If this phenomenon called ‘social media’ takes off as it has, who going to record it, publish it, and enable us, the public, to fully appreciate it.
In 2005, Pete Cashmore founded Mashable.com at the tender age of 19 while living with his parents in Scotland.
An unlikely story of a social media phenomenon… I know..
Mashable started as a blog which Cashmore wrote himself while recovering from an operation in his teens. He would write about things he saw around him and about the things he had read on the internet and in books. The blog gained readers and subscribers week on week, with people sharing Cashmore’s thirst in technological change and what it meant for the everyday man. After 18 months, two million people a month read Mashable.
But Today, the social media news site is read by millions of people each month. To put this into a more statistical prospective Mashable have over 20 million unique monthly visitors on average and over 6 million twitter followers, making it a force to be reckoned with in the ‘social media-sphere’.
Mashable.com aims to be a ‘leading source for news, information & resources for the Connected Generation.’ Pete Cashmore’s lovechild claims that it has become one of the most engaged online news communities in world, with 60 Mashable articles being tweeted every minute.
Mashable is the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media and technology. With its closest rivals being The Verge and TechCrunch, these online news communities offer a similar service to Mashable’s model but offer a more streamlined approach focusing on specific industries rather than giving a broad overview of technological growth and change.
Mashable divides it content into different channels, these are social media, tech, business, entertainment, US & World and Lifestyle. Making content quick and assessable depending on users’ preference. Articles are also categorised into The New Stuff, The Next Big Thing and What’s Hot.
To put into prospective how exponential the growth of Mashable.com has been we need to compare it against its closest rival. South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of film, interactive, music festivals and conferences that take place every spring (usually in March) in Austin, Texas, United States. Infographic company Visual.ly created a showdown infographic between Mashable and TechCruch to give a better view on how these social media giants compare.
