Josh Marshall just now: "Announcement to publishers who reshaped business models around Facebook. Bye."
Seriously, I won’t shed a single tear for these “”””publishers””””.
In the dictionary, sure. In reality, for as long as advertisers are how journalists get paid, that difference is whittling towards nil.
I am saying "journalist's standards are increasingly coming second to the generation of advertising revenue".
Once-reptutable media empires embed Outbrain widgets and generate fad-focused, celebrity-focused clickbait garbage because it makes them money. They are not doing this for Journalism's sake. They are doing it for revenue from advertisers. I understand that this is an ancient phenomenon (PG's "suits back in style" essay comes to mind), but I have observed the scale and shallowness of the phenomenon worsening as the coffers get lighter at the news orgs.
For that reason, I am arguing that the "meaningfulness" of the difference between advertisers and journalists appears to be waning.
When you gather news from enough sources you start to see patterns in what gets a lot of attention, and what doesn't.
Long to short, you're naive if you don't think there's a straight line been the mainstrean news media and advertisers.
Note: The mainstream news media should also not be confused with journalism. The reasons are obvious.
My readers are pretty upset, complaining to me that I don't post enough anymore and they're missing events they wanted to know about, but I can't make Facebook show them what Facebook doesn't want to show them. I tell the people to go directly to my website, but for a lot of them Facebook is the only website that exists.
It's a small town without a newspaper or any other media outlets, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep on going because I think it's a worthwhile service. Facebook doesn't make it easy anymore though.
Also, explain the problem to your facebook users and encourage them to use the email subscription to not miss any future events.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
Seems to be a common thing.
My main complaint is, people explicitly chose to follow my content and got used to seeing it... and now it's all gone. They still follow, but they don't see. Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
I guess what I'm asking, is, does Facebook consider the value of you trying to reach those users, on a globally competitive basis (so you're competing with Nike for their attention), or is it cost effective on a more localized basis (you're competing with Sam's Plumbing on third street in the small town)? I haven't tried to reach users on Facebook in the style you're describing, so I'm not familiar with how costly it is comparatively.
I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.
For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.
They're the product, so it doesn't matter if they get what they want or not, so long as they come back.
> Even if I pay, it's not guaranteed to hit the same audience I had before.
If it was guaranteed, what incentive would you have to pay Facebook more?
Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.
Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.
I'm not excusing it, I just want to put it in stark relief because I dislike it.
That was exactly my point : Facebook's business model is to encourage businesses to accumulate followers and to then charge them for communicating with those followers.
It's... shocking, how much of that noise that you can get by without.
To be fair, I'm missing out on a ton of news with regards to the community and culture that I used Facebook to participate in - but my life is measurably better in every other metric for having left the platform. Getting BMX racing news second-hand is a small price to pay for having my mind back.
(Disclaimer: I spent 20+ hours per week on Facebook. It's mostly nice to have those 20+ hours back, and not having to be constantly bombarded by all the evil of this world is a huge plus, too.)
The trick is really to stop worrying about clicks to your site and focus on good content that people will engage with (share, comment, like, whatever). If it's good content people respond well to it and will seek out your brand.
You see the same thing with the savvy companies on Instagram/Snapchat/etc
It's only bad if you're essentially a click-bait factory.
That really reinforces clickbait, but it also makes sure that you absolutely need those first few impressions to really count. Good content doesn't matter if the algorithm keeps it hidden.