The Rise of the Visual Web

It is difficult to dig up declarations on a definite meaning of the Visual Web. It takes many forms for different people. But it’s powered by the most fundamental human instinct and what has been predominant in human communication – storytelling.

With time, communication has undergone definite development throughout the history. But, our brain is wired to process visuals with greater ease than text. Visually presented information is perceived and processed faster than textual content. This translates into user preference for images over text when browsing through web content.

The present day being driven by the ubiquity of mobile phones, photo-sharing sites and social media platforms, visual web has turned out to be a social media phenomenon. It includes design, advertisements, high-quality animations and image-based content.

With decreasing attention spans and declining reading habits, the reliance on visuals has increased. Visual aid improves cognitive ability, ensuring quality retention. Thus, visual representation of information makes it easier for a user to remember it for a longer time.

Due to the increasing time constraints and information overload, people are shifting from long-form articles to image-based content.

The rise of the Visual Web has led brands to primarily focus on image-based content creation. Websites, which were once text-heavy, are now featuring images as the foundation of their content, i.e. more images, less text. Visually represented data has the potential to attract more attention as it is easier to consume, than text.

Visual Web, being more lucrative, has notably helped brand owners combat banner blindness. Image-centric and visual-based advertising is being aggressively adopted over traditional ad formats.

Powered by Google's AMP technology, Web Stories are mobile-focused and user-first. They have rich visuals and crisp text. They support vivid visuals with native video and image performance. Google has bet big on Web Stories – the content format with the help of which users can create highly engaging stories using images, animations and content.

As the Stories format is set to revolutionize the digital media, Web Stories is the next big thing on the Visual Web. Google has started prioritizing websites with fast-loading content, hence Web Stories have high chances of ranking on search engines. And that's reason enough to harness the Stories format on your website which ensures a rich user experience.

Visual Stories lets you start a blog and create content in Web Stories format, by providing you with an Web Story Builder, a powerful, writer-friendly story development tool that makes it easy to create immersive experiences for users.