Facebook puts the squeeze on web publishing
News feed cuts a cash-grab
Facebook is giving up on the news, cutting publishers off at the knees in what they are casting as a move to focus user timelines on friends and family — but it looks suspiciously like a shakedown.
It’s hard to imagine a Facebook newsfeed without the constant drip of BuzzFeed listicles, breaking news from national outlets, viral political memes and stopmotion videos of impossibly delicious recipes, but that’s the crux of last week’s announcement by Facebook Engineering Director Lars Backstrom.
“Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline,” Backstrom’s online announcement reads. “For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts.”
In other words: Just because users “like” your page doesn’t mean we’ll show them your content.
This has already been the case for small businesses, which know too well the perils of Facebook’s punishing algorithms. Facebook pages run by small businesses and retailers have been on a payto-play basis for some time. It’s nearly impossible to grow a business page organically on Facebook. The way your content will be surfaced is if you pay for posts to be boosted and likes to be solicited.
Now Facebook is focusing on extracting the same cash-grab from publishers, and the new strategy to depress certain timeline stories in favor of those that have already gained the endorsement of friends and family was an implicit slap at them. Facebook’s news feed manager Adam Mosseri wrote that the company’s research shows that people want to see posts that “inform” and “entertain.” The latter is particularly important and unfortunate. For instance, how many of us first learned of last week’s murder of 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel in Israel in a Facebook news feed? Probably fewer than if this tragedy had occurred a year ago.
The horrid news about the U.S. national stabbed to death by a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank was informative but of course it wasn’t entertaining, and so it was likely suppressed by Facebook’s new algorithm tweaks.
The incident provides a window into Facebook’s thinking: The West Bank conflict spawns the type of discord and debate on Facebook that cuts so deep that it is apt to turn some users off. It’s now not uncommon to hear about people staying away from Facebook when something like this happens. They don’t want to see or hear about people who disagree with their take on an emotional issue. Especially if that person is their crazy uncle or an opinionated parent.
That’s why this new strategy is akin to Facebook becoming the anti-Twitter. Facebook execs have seen how Twitter’s reliance on news events for clicks and eyeballs is a losing strategy. Inevitably, we’re just not grownup enough to have civilized debates, and people become mean little cyber jerks when given the tools. In Twitter’s case, it meant such a trolling takeover that the user base has plateaued and the network is in need of a total makeover.
So, the decision by Facebook to become the network of friends and family isn’t altogether surprising as much as it is shortsighted and a missed opportunity to guide and civilize the public discourse in favor of abandoning it altogether.
To be sure, Facebook has a nearly impossible task. Never has any entity — let alone, a social network — had so much content in need of curation and monitoring. Keeping people organized into little agreeing factions sure seems like a cure-all.
But it also shows deep flaws that go straight to the top. Facebook still doesn’t know what its core purpose is, and the announcement about the timeline changes came with muddled and mixed messages.
For example, the announcement reads that “Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family.”
And that’s just not true. Facebook started as a way for college kids to connect with each other. Its mushrooming success spawned a huge expansion that eventually led to the organization’s stated mission of making it easier for the world to connect. There’s nothing in there about friends and family.
For publishers, the move is a clear message that social media is a tool, but not a growth strategy. The media have always had to do more with less, and now they’re forced to be even more creative.