LittleThings online publisher shuts down, blames Facebook's algorithm
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
>“I think we need each other. We need them for the traffic; they need us for the content,” Mr. Speiser said on this week’s WSJ Media Mix podcast. “I think [Facebook] cares very much. I think without the content all these media companies are providing there’d be that much less reason to go on to the news feed.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-loves-publishers-says-...
Turns out no, I like my newsfeed better without all that content. The content I want to see on facebook is things that my friends post.
> Any publisher that is dependent on Facebook, or that trusts Facebook, is out of their goddamn mind.
I think it is okay to bootstrap this way, but you must have an exit strategy.
Eventually Facebook caught on that this was annoying and not a good use of the news feed, but if your business was dependent on it I imagine the effects were similar.
Having seen that happen before, building a company based on what Facebook decides to put in the news feed sounds insane.
Collect everyone's email address along the way? Then you might as well be an email newsletter business.
That doesn't necessarily mean "email newsletter business", it could be any of the number of ways businesses have tried to convert first impressions into continued engagement. The referral platform shouldn't particularly matter, really. Today's complaints about Facebook-driven traffic drying up are last century's complaints about Yellow Pages-driven phone calls drying up. How are you handling people after they arrived/called? What other avenues for referrals have you explored? There's a lot of business advice that I don't think has largely changed there anywhere near as much as the technology medium has.
I like email because it's one of the only "push" media that's both widely deployed and decentralized. (I once thought RSS would become that for the web, but it hasn't worked out that way.)
In any event, if you've been relying on Facebook to supply 75% of the traffic that goes in the top of the funnel, you're going to be having a bad day when that disappears. Even if the funnel is great.
As an RSS fan (and still an active user), I do agree that one of the prime failings here was that publishers in general too strongly backed the Facebook horse instead of, say, training users about the advantages of RSS. But yeah, why do the hard work today when you can wait for the rug to pulled out from under you by a third party and then do the hard work anyway?
Wow, that's adorable
This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Deluding oneself into thinking Facebook "needs" them, when in actuality it's Facebook with 1000 times the power. Did anyone seriously believe this?
What's wrong with you? Do you just not give a fuck about cats??
In the business world many people say you should never put more the 30% of budget at anytime in one market onless yuo have a way to switch out of it. Since 75% of LittleThings' traffic came from Facebook a YouTube style adpocolipse scenario was bound to happen eventually.
> took out roughly 75% of LittleThings' organic traffic while hammering its profit margins.
From my admittedly limited expertise this would be called "Social" traffic. In a time gone by, even "Referral" traffic. I don't imagine that the frequency of links appearing in private news feeds would lead to any change in organic traffic.
It may well be an editorial error, but if it's from the horses mouth it's almost as worrying as the marketing strategy itself.
In this case, I'd guess they are referring to their organic reach within FB that in turn drove traffic to their site. I could also see it impacting actual organic traffic though. To the degree search algorithms may factor in social relevance, any backlinks gained from things shared on social and then posted to websites, etc., I could see plummeting social reach ripple out to organic traffic to Google potentially.
The founders of LittleThings knew what they were doing. I’m guessing they pocketed good profits in the beginning and then tried to cash out at the end. Everyone knew this Facebook newsfeed traffic would end like Zynga.
It has been a big positive for publishers who were getting lower CPMs because these sites were sucking display network ad spend dry every day. I assume it’s also a big positive for society since fewer drivers are looking at dumb Facebook clickbait while flying down the highway.
That's 1/3 of the people on the planet. Even if you don't trust that number, its hard to criticize them because they don't have enough users.
In the US & Canada, the number of active accounts has been in decline.
https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com...
Granted, only by ~1 million, but that's not growth.
Facebook will always be profitable in some respect, just as AOL is still profitable, but it's entirely possible that people are going to get bored and move on to other things. Old folks will still use Facebook to debate about which Denny's in town has the better supreme skillet, but there's no sign that Facebook will hold on to the ubiquity it currently has.
Maybe Facebook will continue to mean something to the world outside the west, which a graph in the story I linked to seems to suggest.
https://digiday.com/media/littlethings-shuts-casualty-facebo...
I still find people, even guys, filling my feed with Tasty and look-alike videos.
If they don't have enough of a core audience to monetize what's left... or even try, I would wonder what they were really up to.
This site may have been one of the weakest ones, but this same issue is playing out for newspapers and other media organizations, for instance. Facebook owned the audience, pushed those organizations to tailor their product to it, then pulled the rug out from under them. That's an enormous amount of power for one company to have.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of internet traffic is controlled by a handful of algorithms controlled by an even smaller number of organizations. Their inscrutable whims can make or break businesses, and that's far to much power for them to have.
i still prefer open my rss reader rather than open any social media sites/app, except when i want to to see what my friends do than i open my socmed
Getting my “content” via RSS is like reading in a cozy, quiet library, whereas with social it’s like trying to read between a busy construction site and a highway on-ramp, complete with obnoxious honking and plastered with billboards.
> "Facebook is the destroyer of worlds."
> The prioritization of friends/family content over publishers was the last straw.
Media used to live and die on search engine traffic. SEO was king, getting ranked in searches was how you thrived. Once Facebook (and to a much smaller extent, Twitter) showed up, it became about the all-important share. Facebook worked very hard to make sure that people consumed a vast majority of their news and media diet through Facebook itself, and consumption patterns heavily changed as a result. Facebook became the 9000lb gorilla driving your traffic, and the extent to which you lived and died depended on how much money you were willing to put towards paid promotion of your content. They even built out ecosystems like Facebook Instant Articles, which move content off the publisher's platform and directly into Facebook.
With the newsfeed algorithm changes, media companies are left with an audience that doesn't use search and can't get contact with their articles via the channel they previously used to. Traffic is just gone, and it's going to kill a lot of already-struggling publishers as a result.
This is a good point that may not be universally understood. Just as Facebook can suppress certain content when it's useful for them, they also artificially "boost" content when it's useful for them.
For example, when Facebook Live was introduced you could get very high "reach" numbers (compared to your "normal" reach) simply by using this new feature that Facebook wanted to promote.