@Publish

Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.

Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.

the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.

how exactly does Yahoo plan on stealing away YouTube's video creators? Easy: It will appeal to those that rely on their videos for income, and pay them better.

About two-third of Instagram users in 2012 were female, but eMarketer projects that by 2016, the discrepancy between the two genders will drop to 55 percent female, 45 percent male.

Although Twitter and Instagram are quite different, their user counts and demographics are strikingly similar. eMarketer estimates that 43.2 million U.S. consumers used Twitter monthly last year — or 17.6 percent of the total Internet user population. Meanwhile, Instagram users represented 16.1 percent of internet users in 2013. On smartphones — where Instagram activity almost exclusively takes place — Twitter had just 30.8 million users in 2013, and this number will increase to 37.3 million in 2014, or 22.7 percent of U.S. smartphone users. Both figures fall slightly below those for total Instagram users — 34.6 million in 2013, increasing to 40.5 million in 2014, eMarketer estimates.

Overall, Twitter’s U.S. user base shows signs of maturing in its demographic composition, spreading the user population more evenly across age groups, while Instagram is still largely limited to a pool of millennial and Gen X users. Last year, nearly 70 percent of Instagram’s U.S. users were ages 18 to 44; this year, that figure will drop, but only to 67.5 percent. In 2014, Twitter’s user base from 18 to 44 will account for about 60 percent of its overall users.

50 percent of social network users share or repost news stories, images, or videos, while 46 percent discuss news or current events on their networks, and 11 percent have submitted their own content to news websites or blogs. Pew reiterated its findings from a report earlier this month that Internet users who arrive at the 26 news websites it analyzed by directly typing in those sites’ URLs or via bookmarks spend far more time on those sites, view more pages, and return more times per month that Internet users who arrive via Facebook.

78 percent of Facebook users see news while they are on the social network for other reasons. Only 34 percent of Facebook news consumers like news organizations or individual journalists, which Pew interprets to mean that most of the news they see on the social network is shared by their friends. Facebook news consumers reported seeing entertainment news the most, followed by “people and events in my community,” sports, national government/politics, crime, health/medicine, and local government/politics. News consumers on LinkedIn were high earners and college-educated, while those from Twitter were younger than those from Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.

One-half of Facebook users get news there even though they did not go there looking for it. And the Facebook users who get news at the highest rates are 18- to-29-year-olds.

Facebook's Newsfeed algorithm, formerly called EdgeRank

It's becoming apparent that there's a still a misconception in some circles around the idea that Facebook is an agnostic platform—akin to a public plaza—that doesn't systematically curate the user experience. Indeed, it's become safe to say that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital giant is tweaking its algorithm to highlight content in a fashion that's not unlike a newspaper or magazine's online presence.

just as Google has reworked its search algorithm over the years to the chagrin of SEO marketers, Facebook's maneuvers are now making publishers rethink their Newsfeed strategies. Whether more ad spend is the result of this thought process remains to be seen.

a recent study by Shareaholic found that post-click engagement with Facebook posts trailed far behind the results delivered by YouTube, and also lagged behind Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Shareaholic examined six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors

YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate (43.19 percent), the highest pages per visit (2.99), and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds).

video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions that complement the audio and visual content they just consumed.

Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely-regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

a spike in retweets among those in the 71-100 character range—so-called “medium” length tweets. These medium tweets have enough characters for the original poster to say something of value and for the person retweeting to add commentary as well.

the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

In print design, we’re told that serif fonts are considered the most readable. The serifs purportedly serve as aids to the eye, moving you from one letter to the next in a smoother fashion.

The bottom line is that the fewer details a font needs to convey a character clearly, the more readable it will appear on a broader range of screens.

the current consensus–at least as close as anyone can get to one–is that sans-serif fonts are still superior for screen body text, and serif fonts are best used for headings. For many users with newer displays, though, the difference is negligible.

A new chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, shows that over 86% of the time spent in iOS and Android apps is taking place inside applications. That’s up 6% from just last year.

“Posting pictures to Facebook only works well, if the pictures are self-explanatory.”

Pictures outperform everything. Our friends at KISSmetrics put it the best way, showing that this counts for likes, clicks, shares and comments alike:

if you have created a Twitter following that you can use to validate your blogpost headlines and ideas, I think this is one of the most powerful ways to make sure none of your precious time goes to waste. You can of course use that same technique for Facebook too, in case Twitter is not your forte.