Media Freaks Out About Facebook Changes; Maybe They Shouldn't Have Become So Reliant On Facebook
from the pivot-to-bankruptcy dept
Last week, a large part of the media ecosystem seemed to totally flip out following Facebook's announcement that it was going to effectively de-prioritize news content in favor of content from friends and family. Facebook was pretty direct about how this will decrease traffic to many publishers:
Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.
As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it. Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.
From Facebook's standpoint, this move is a pretty easy one to make. Even though it had spent the past few years heavily courting news publishers (including directly paying large publishers many millions of dollars to "pivot to video"), the company hadn't totally succeeded in becoming the go to source for news (that remains Twitter's strength). And yet, Facebook was also getting more and more grief over news items in its feeds, especially post-election when people incorrectly wanted to "blame" news on Facebook for Donald Trump's presidential victory.
On top of that, this move will only enforce something that Facebook had been inching towards for a while: forcing businesses and publishers to pay to have their news reach a larger audience. So... if this means that Facebook makes more money, distresses fewer people, and doesn't get attacked as much for the so-called problem of "fake news" it looks like a total win from Facebook's perspective.
Publishers, on the other hand, were generally freaked out. Many have spent the past 5 years or so desperately trying to "play the Facebook game." And, for many, it gave them a decent boost in traffic (if not much revenue). But, in the process, they proceeded to lose their direct connection to many readers. People coming to news sites from Facebook don't tend to be loyal readers. They're drive-bys.
This is why we actually think this is a good thing. As we've discussed in the past, if your entire business is reliant on someone else's platform, you're going to be in trouble. That other platform can pull the rug out from under you in an instant -- as may be the case here.
This is a big part of the reason that we've deliberately refused to "play the Facebook game" over the years, even as friends at other publishers kept telling us we were missing out on traffic. As I noted a few weeks ago in our 2017 wrap-up post, we're pretty proud of the fact that a plurality of our visitors are visiting directly, and that less than 20% of our visits come from social media. It suggests that our audience is pretty loyal, and I don't need to freak out about changes on any platform -- whether its social, search or something else.
Of course, it won't be surprising to see some publishers continue to throw away good resources and time towards trying to "game" this new system. As Facebook's announcement states, since it will promote content that people "interact" with, expect to see a lot of ridiculous "comment begging" or "share begging" from publishers. At Techdirt we've long forbidden any kind of "comment begging" in our posts (e.g., "Here's some crazy opinion! Do you agree or disagree? Let us know below!") because it feels cheap, manipulative and inauthentic, rather than genuine. I don't want to insult your intelligence with such things, but I expect many publishers, desperate for that Facebook traffic drip, will resort to that kind of thing.
The better solution, hopefully, is that many more publications will get over their needy relationship with platforms like Facebook, and focus on building actual, loyal audiences. If not, perhaps they'll go away. And, frankly, if they've spent the past few years living off of ephemeral Facebook traffic, it's not clear that many will miss them.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: algorithms, business models, fake news, journalism, media, news feed, the facebook game
Companies: facebook
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
publishers knew this was coming
Specifically, brands and news orgs have been told that the number of their posts that make it into user feeds is being ratcheted back down to levels before Facebook thought Twitter was going to kill them because they do breaking news better. There will be fewer ads served and so the cost of those ads is going to rise.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Facebook sucks
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Did I miss any "Teh Socials?"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
That was pretty hard to write without hitting the space bar.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Missing socials
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lost Clicks
The difference here is that Facebook is doing it to the news orgs rather than the government.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Was only ever begrudgingly at FB for a short while, and they seem to change everything every few weeks anyway, so i am not sure my comment here has any validity anyway.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Coming soon, to a Facebook feed somewhere:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Coming soon, to a Facebook feed somewhere:
It's the new ad-blocker block.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
News organizations made this mistake with Facebook. Photographers made this mistake with Picasa. Developers made this mistake with Slack. And so on.
And what's worse/ironic, is that every day it becomes easier to build and run your own infrastructure. There is now free open-source code for everything that's worth doing. Hardware is cheap and plentiful. Robust, capable operating systems are also free and open-source. And the communities behind all of these are far more helpful than any commercial support organization.
Yes, it's easier to rely on someone else. Yes, they make it tempting. There's a reason for that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
Hardware manufacturers will learn this too.
A couple months ago I bought a Ricoh spherical image camera. Firmware updates and a few other features require logging into the Ricoh site. But they don't do their own authentication; you must have a Facebook or Twitter account, and log in with that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
There are products out there that make perfect sense to have control or monitoring on your phone, and sell that as a feature. You simply connect via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
It's only after you purchase and open it that your discover that it *doesn't* connect to your phone. It only connects to an overseas server, which gives you limited access from your phone in return for handing over even MORE data that the device itself doesn't collect.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
And while at first glance it may appear to be cheaper to just be a sharecropper: it's not. Not really. The $400 you drop on a grad student to properly configure a Drupal system is a lot cheaper than the $0 you drop on a "free" host.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
Also configuration and maintenance of a server is not a one time job, but requires some expertise to deal with security updates, and someone available to do the necessary, maybe at short notice.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
And as to skillsets, I expect that anyone who calls themselves even an entry-level system administrator should be fully capable of installing operating systems, configuring firewalls, setting up and running HTTP/SMTP/DNS/etc. services, dealing with security and abuse issues, and so on. This is baseline competence in the field. And anyone who's been doing it for a while should have a much larger set of skills, e.g., ability to build the OS from source, knowledge of failover techniques, ability to set up load balancing, and so on.
And if you have to rely on third parties for services, then you should (a) spread the services around: no more than one per entity and (b) make sure that you architect everything so that you can quickly and seamlessly cut over when you need to. Never design in reliance on any one vendor.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
"Don't rely on third party services. If you don't have the time or expertise to do it yourself, then find a third party to pay to set services up for you and rely on them."
Well, that's a fun contradiction. Your (second) point about reliance on a single vendor is spot on, whether that's a raw material supplier for widgets you build, a cloud hosting provider, or outsourced IT work, you need to be prepared to deal with them vanishing.
It's fine if it's a bit disruptive to do so, and it's even fine if your business is less effective as a result. Hell, that's expected, it's the reason why you were using a vendor in the first place, they are able to provide value in excess of their costs, due to expertise, economies of scale, etc. You don't want to be in a position where your business goes under (or takes a significant hit) because a vendor goes belly-up, but trying to do everything yourself isn't the answer either.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Deliberately choosing to be a sharecropper is a bad move
But a relationship with a vendor is business-customer interaction. The vendor is a business; the client is a customer.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Remind me again how to support TechDirt...
Well, there are ads on the site which you can click on (especially if they offer you something useful). There are deals. You could choose to buy an ad. You can contribute through Patreon if that's your preference.
You could help them get a good scoop by submitting a story. You can participate in the comments, helping to grow the community. You can share links to TechDirt on Facebook (!!) or other media sources to help get the word out. And best of all, you can just pay them money.
And before you ask: No, I wasn't asked to submit this comment. I don't even know Mike Masnick and the other folks who run this place. I'm just a pleased user who wants his media to continue delivering good news and realizes that it isn't possible without some source of income.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Remind me again how to support TechDirt...
Or... tell 2 friends, and they'll tell 2 friends, and they'll tell 2 friends, and so on, and so on. ;)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Remind me again how to support TechDirt...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
News Comments
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Manchuriabook
The question had to be asked: was the prioritising or hiding of posts only showing each user what they wanted to see; or also was herding people into categories to make advertising easier.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Manchuriabook
No it doesn't.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Reminds me of an Oatmeal comic from a while ago:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/comics/reaching_people/reaching_people.png
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
FB and Ads
I really hated to when the news feed started to show tons of "suggested" post. Yea, they are ads. People paid to boost that post. I kept trying to hide, unlike, and get rid of them. When they keep coming back, I would be in problem reports with FB. The they started putting things in my news feed asking to me pay to boost a post for the page I help admin.
I kept reporting that I don't want to see this, it is spam.
Every new thing they keep putting in he new feed that has no way to turn off or hide or set some preference, I report as bug.
Maybe, just maybe, they are starting to understand people don't want this crap in the newsfeed. If they want to put it in one of the side bars that i ignore, go right ahead. But ads, or house ads for other fb services is not news.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Remembering Google Reader
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I don't even have a Facebook account
If you aren't already sending me a news feed, then I either don't find your content interesting, Informative, or in any other manner worthwhile... or maybe I've never heard of you... probably because you use Facebook.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Serves them right
All happened after google dropped their reader tool, it's like they want to be dependent on some other big company/site/tool, not embracing the users power to choose what they want.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I'm thinking a lot of the complaining is just coming from sites that can easily afford to take a hit and it's more just about watching a source of traffic get squeezed and freaking out over it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]