Today, an interesting study came to light, posted by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb about the Social Media. We knew some of the similar numbers through different sources when we actually started research on Redanyway i.e. couple of months back. We always have to take these numbers with a grain of salt, but it’s good to have more of these numbers to strengthen the argument. Following data, published by Universal McCann’s “Media in Mind” study, interests more to us,

• 1 out of 10 U.S. adults now publish blogs (up from 5% last year)
• 1 out of 5 18-34-year olds publish blogs (up from 10% last year)

(You should also check out more of this data and studies published by Universal McCann’s it’s very interesting)

It’s awesome that how number of bloggers have increased nowadays and we think people are now taking it more seriously than ever. But, this study also fails to take under consideration the retention of these bloggers and frequency of the posts. While we were researching we found many of the studies showing that about 50% of the bloggers abandon their blog in a month or two due to many reasons. Of them following ones are very common,

1. I was not getting very many comments to my blog posts
2. There were too few subscribers
3. Did not notice any increase in traffic to the website
4. Coming up with regular, new content was too much effort
5. Did not see a clear way to promote our products and services in the blog.

(Source: NewsVend)

I think most of you will agree with the above reasons. It’s really hard to promote your blog and engage your readers. And we here at Redanyway are trying to solve the exact same problem and not just blogging, but with any of your website. It’s important to bring social element to your website and there should a structured service or platform available to empower that. Twitter is great example of that. It gave us a great platform for microblogging letting us easily ‘follow’ (or you can say subscribe) user’s/blogger’s feed, discover new feeds or socialize in easier and better way. And now this platform is so extensible (I am not talking about the twitter outages ) that nowadays many things are possible to make out of it. Imagine what would have happened if we would have microblogged on our own, it would have been horrible to promote or make your friends or others to follow it. We think more or less exact thing has happened to blogging and it’s getting more and more harder to find new subscribers or follow new good blogs on the net.

We here, at Redanyway respect bloggers very much, we think that it’s a form of a natural human expression. We always recommend you to have a blog to express yourself and not just blogging but also to have all media like photostream, videostream at one place as a your expression . But, of course all this with less hassle of spreading this to your friends or followers and we at, Redanyway strive to find you solution for this.

Internet today is fraught with social networking websites and community platforms. Each of them is trying to attract the users by offering different features. But when we look around, there are not many ‘successful’ SNWs .The reason being, not many of them actually offer you any unique feature.

We expect less customization: Why are we satisfied with what a SNW or a platform has to offer us and limit ourselves to the constraints they put on the way we interact socially? Why are we expecting less from the web when it has endless possibilities?

We expect less (read ’no’) branding: The content that users bring along with them to a community platform or a SNW add to the value of these platform. This makes Flickr: ‘the destination for best photos’ or Youtube: ‘the place to find great videos’. What about the branding of the user? Well, he/she is a ‘mere quality enhancer’ and a ‘mere content provider’ to these sites who may even has to pay for these platforms!

We expect less (read ’no’) money: Most social networking sites have ad-based revenue model in which they earn money by selling ad spaces on each page. So every page (including any user’s profile page) is being sold by these SNWs to ads. Now to make this model work these SNWs rely on the users’ content to engage other users. Interesting! So my video with some friends having a wild vacation on the beach is ideal for these SNWs to make money. I wonder why I am not getting paid for my content or for being popular and driving more traffic to my profile page?

We need to change the way we ‘are’ on the web. We should not be ‘mere providers of value and quality’ or ‘providers’ for that matter. We should keep our content and still get the due credit for its value. This can only be achieved when we start differentiating ‘platform/tool providers’ and the ‘content/quality providers’ and start appreciating them for who they are.

Expect more! Demand more! Let’s paint the web RED.

Here, begins the official journey of Redanyway. This is our first startup with three founding members i.e. me, Rohan and Sujay. Even though we made a few small attempts before, this is our first full-fledged startup. An attempt of launching a Go-karting track in Pune tops that chart and please don’t ask me, where all that came from.

Our story goes back to more than five years from now. We have been friends since our college days, have shared many ‘first’ moments and this is one of them. We had very interesting journey so far on Redanyway, going back and forth and dropping the ’s’ from the name is one them. It all began back in India with an idea, in an attempt to help the whole web. Everything else then just followed, like an application to Techstars, then getting shortlisted only to be put in the alternate list and finally getting here in Boulder. Yes, there is another interesting story behind how we landed here, but that’s for later or may be not. To say it in less words, we had a short stint in Techstars, we learned a lot and we really thank David and Techstars for that.

We have now begun on this with a very strong belief and excitement. At this moment, I cannot divulge much details about Redanyway, but I can assure you there is something in it for you. Me and my friends will be sharing moments and experience of this beautiful journey from time to time with you and also giving out all the product updates on this blog. So hit the subscribe button on the right.

You can also follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/redanyway or mail us at info(at)redanyway(.)com