How Facebook stole the news business | TechCrunch - 0 views
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By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.
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In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.
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This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”
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38 of 72 Instant Articles launch partner publications including the New York Times and Washington Post have ditched the Facebook controlled format according to a study by Columbia Journalism Review.
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The problem is that for society as a whole, this leads to a demonetization and eventual defunding of some news publishers, content creators and utility providers while simultaneously making them heavily reliant on Facebook. This gives Facebook the power to decide what types of content, what topics, and what sources are important. Even if Facebook believes itself to be a neutral tech platform, it implicitly plays the role of media company as its values define the feed. Having a single editor’s fallible algorithms determine the news consumption of the wired world is a precarious situation.
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the real problem only manifests when Facebook shifts directions. Its comes to the conclusion that users want to see more video, so the format gets more visibility in the News Feed. Soon, publishers scramble to pivot to video, hiring teams and buying expensive equipment so they can blast the content on Facebook rather than thinking about their loyal site visitors. But then Facebook decides too much passive video is bad for you or isn’t interesting, so its News Feed visibility is curtailed, and publishers have wasted their resources and time chasing a white rabbit… or, in this case, a blue one.