Have you noticed more "infographics" recently?

There's a reason for that.  If you look, for example, at a recent one entitled "All About Blood" and then scroll all the way to the bottom, you see, next to a smattering of unclickable links from which the infographic data was obtained, a logo for "Online Schools" and a clickable "source" for the infographic which will take you to an online school for medical assistants.

I received an email earlier this week from a producer of infographics, offering to pay me if I would host infographics on TYWKIWDBI.  I declined, because I'm trying to keep this blog commercial-free for as long as I can - although the temptation gets stronger the longer this economic slowdown persists.

There is of course nothing "wrong" with sponsorship of infographics.  It's a perfectly valid way to establish name recognition and seek business traffic, and probably in the large majority of instances the content is valid and noncontroversial.  But it's worth understanding that their proliferation of infographics reflects not so much an embracing of a popular graphic art form as an embracing of a way for bloggers to monetize their product.

Addendum:  A hat tip to Internev for providing this link to a Reddit thread explaining how infographics are used for search engine optimization.