What is Digital Media?

Digital media is any form of communication that is delivered and distributed by the power of digitalization. Today, digital media comes in many forms: videos, games, articles, memes, images, posts, applications, and more. Digital media can be a powerful medium to reach audiences. Unique from telecommunications, digital media can last forever and is usually stored as data.

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Why is Digital Media So Powerful?

Digital media is accessible to anyone who is connected into the larger digital network the content is published on. For example, if you post on Instagram, everyone who has an account can access that piece of digital media. This is unique from regular media as you would have to find a way to deliver that media in a non-digital way (i.e. mail, billboards, flyers). Regular media is bound to its original locations because of its slow distribution and delivery power.

Here are two stats to think about:

Over 4.62 billion people use social media.
Over 5.03 billion people are on the internet.

Talk about distribution power! On the internet, 5 billion people have the ability to easily access your content by simply typing in a url to their Google search bar. This is something regular media cannot compete with.

How Much Digital Media Is There?

The simple answer is a lot. But, instead of settling for that, we decided to crunch some numbers to give us a better idea of what it could look like:

The internet contains over 6 billion individual webpages. For instance, this post, “What is Digital Media,” is one of the 6 billion pages. The internet also contains over 2 billion websites. This website, Adogy.com, is one of the 2 billion websites.
On Instagram, more than 50 billion posts have been uploaded. On Facebook, 1 billion stories are shared every day.
The estimated amount of data in the world is 44 total zetabytes, which one of the zettabytes is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits. According to Phys.org, it would take “3 million years” to download the entire internet at speedy downloading speeds.

So, while there is an abundance of people on the digital medium, there is also an over-abundance of content. If you started reading the internet from the time you were born to the end of your life, you would not have finished consuming 1% of the content. With so much content, it is important to keep your content fresh, relevant, and valuable. Otherwise, the content can be lost in the ‘sea of content.”

The Purpose of Google and Digital Media SEO

The purpose of Google is

to maximize access to information, to organize the world’s information, and make it universally accessible and useful.

If you want your content to be displayed, you need to join Google on its mission and purpose. While black hat SEO techniques may work in the short-term, Google will eventually displace your content if it is not optimally following its mission statement. If you want your content to rise above the ‘sea of content,’ it needs to be organized, accessible, and useful.

Organization can be measured by overall site structure, page structure, and informational relevance/relationships.
Accessibility can be measured by site performance, link functionality, security, and linking structures.
Usefulness can be measured by informational credibility, quality and length of content, page-view times, and bounce-rates.

Google uses past history of good ‘performance’ as an indicator for future good performance and authority in information. That is why older sites are more likely to have a higher domain authority and relevance in Google’s eyes. In most cases, new sites have a waiting period of six months before Google starts to legitimately consider ranking it for search results.

If you want to accelerate your progress in search rankings and Google authority, you need to get links from long-standing authoritative sites that Google already approves of. “Approval” from high domain authority sites will signal that your site has quality, accessible, and useful content.

The Importance of Digital Media

While vast, digital media is continually making information more accessible to all. This includes information about yourself and your company. Participating in this massive mission to make information more accessible and useful for all will not only make you an authority in your space, but will get you and your company seen. If you are a box maker, become the information authority in box making. People will then know who to go to make their next box.

Need Help with Digital Media?

The author of this post is Adogy, a digital media agency, focused on PR and search engine optimization. If you want to steup up your digital media game, schedule a call with us today.