While there are lots of anecdotal stories about the #indieweb, lately I've found myself wanting to back them up with hard, quantifiable data. For some people, the underlying principles of ownership, control and reach resonate and make sense; others need further persuasion that the movement is gaining momentum.

I think this kind of evidence-gathering is a good exercise. And of course, it has a selfish purpose too: backing up the need for Known.

The ideological case

Dan Gillmor made the broader case most clearly over on Slate:

We're in danger of losing what's made the Internet the most important medium in history: a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks—that would be you and me—don't need permission to communicate, create, and innovate.

Privacy

Nonetheless, the statistics suggest that the most readily-apparent value of the #indieweb revolves around privacy. Last September, the PewResearch Internet Project found that:

[..] growing numbers of internet users (50%) say they are worried about the amount of personal information about them that is online - a figure that has jumped from 33% who expressed such worry in 2009.

People would like control over their information, saying in many cases it is very important to them that only they or the people they authorize should be given access to such things as the content of their emails, the people to whom they are sending emails, the place where they are when they are online, and the content of the files they download.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research suggests that the cloud isn't eating all software:

According to research outfit Forrester, businesses are moving to public cloud services in big numbers. By 2020, the firm says, cloud computing will account for about 15 percent of the IT market, which spans all the hardware and software and services that companies use to run their operations. But many analysts and other industry watchers believe that certain companies — especially those bound by government regulations, including financial and healthcare companies — will keep certain applications running in their own data centers. “It’s not about having everything running externally or everything running internally,” says David Cearley, a vice president at Gartner Research. “It’s about both.”

Privacy continues to be a driver for ownership, helped by the fact that 2013 was the worst-ever year for data breaches:

Working on data from the Open Security Foundation and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the OTA estimated that over 740 million online records were exposed in 2013, the worst year for data breaches in history.

Placing personal data in a central location creates a giant honeypot for such breaches.

Commerce

Not owning the site you use to communicate with your customers can hurt your ability to actually reach them. AdAge reported that the number of users seeing Facebook posts from brand pages they'd engaged with was dropping:

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they "like" was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

This trend has continued. AdWeek reported that Facebook referrals to sites like Upworthy, the New York Times and Business Insider had dropped by up to 50% since November 2013. AdAge noted that Facebook in the past had "particularly objected to the inference that [..] changes had been made to spur marketers to spend more on ads to make up for lost reach":

But now Facebook is making the case for marketers to do just that. In the document, titled "Generating business results on Facebook," the paragraph in which the impending drop-off in organic reach is revealed concludes with an ad pitch; marketers are told they should consider paid distribution "to maximize delivery of your message in news feed."

Valleywag alleged some very drastic numbers associated with this strategy:

A source professionally familiar with Facebook's marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is "in the process of" slashing "organic page reach" down to 1 or 2 percent.

In other words, now they've convinced everyone to sign up to their network, Facebook is charging people to get their messages through - something that would be free if this communication happened over a decentralized web.

Growth

Each of these trends is growing. More people are thinking about owning their own platform overall; people are more concerned about privacy online than ever before; the social networks we've all been taken for granted have been taking more liberties with the form, reach and content of our communications.

More data is needed, and I'll be posting regularly with new facts and statistics. If anyone has anything you'd like to add, or if you'd like to get in touch for any other reason, feel free to email me: ben@withknown.com