CollegeHumor is blaming this on Facebook for faking viewership numbers.
This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last.
We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.
This isn't the first time Facebook killed culture, and it won't be the last.
We really need to de-platform or find a way Facebook can't steal value.
If this is the fact, does that mean we can get plain text back?
Why not put up a few videos and compare ad revenue? When it didn't add up they could just move back...
I doubt most people agree with that read though.
"So, Mr. Sullivan, why don't you tell me what you think is going on here, and please speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever. I didn't get here on my brains -- I can assure you of that."
Stage 1: What you can learn.
Stage 2: What you know.
Stage 3: Who you know.
https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120
An article about the settlement, including a link to the document itself: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-mi...
People won't pay for a subscription for that, people won't donate enough to keep the business afloat, and people don't actually want to use attention tokens/microtransactions.
A lot of people claimed that these alternatives work, but I've yet to see a business prove that they actually work.
Still, since that is how I consume content, and since they already laid everyone off, I cancelled my trial.
It's tough to make a living being a comedian. Especially in an era of deeply-interconnected communication where "everyone's a comedian."
Poorly executed business models based on faulty data and no clear profitability are fragile.
They are ad platform providers which gives them a totally different position of power than 99% of companies out there trying to live on ad revenue.
The business models are identical, just with vastly different scales.
Google and Facebook can leverage their power to put entire industries out of business.
CollegeHumor had a lot of hits and spawned some genuine talent that is now earning money on its own merits (Jake and Amir, Adam Conover) but overall the content was not consistent enough to have an overall draw that was worth subscribing to.
Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud).
Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems.
But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.
The problem is that when Patreon allows high risk activities, those activities poison the well, and all "legit" processors must stop offering their services. Thereby, Patreon is now left with using more high-risk-tolerant processors, but paying the same high fees for all activities regardless of its actual risk.
That's an issue with the payment manager, not the currency used for payment.
> Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud).
I agree completely.
> Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems.
I disagree here. Presumably, the assessment that adult content is higher risk is valid, and Patreon would just assume that risk themselves if they didn't involve a third party payment processor, regardless of the currency used for payment.
Is your claim that fraud would be reduced because there's no real way to reverse a crypto transaction at the moment? If so, my stance is that accepting crypto would just open them up to other issues associated with fraud, and wouldn't be worth the effort.
> But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.
I agree with this as well, which is another reason crypto isn't the solution here.
You will have fees no matter the payment processor, but crypto has the lowest if you don't need speed. Cutting out the processor achieves this first aim, even though fees are still necessary to run Patreon. Whether or not they're too high after this is another matter.
Adult content is primarily high risk because of credit card charge backs -- it's very rampant. Being illegal operations is another matter that concerns wire fraud and may cause uneccesary burden on the payment processor were it invovled in a criminal investigation.
The chargebacks, higher risk, and threat of investigation are all priced into more "lax" payment processor's fees. Crypto doesn't need to price this in because: it's practically non-reversible and there is no centralized body fronting the risk, i.e decentralized operations.
The blockchain network fronts the risk for wire fraud, so that no other entity, f.e Patreon or PayPal, need to.
I have no stance or argument, these are just some musings I wrote from my observations in the "industry."
Crypto is the preferred payment processor of high risk businesses. Everything else that caters to it is downright garbage in comparison.
Fees are a moot discussion when the underlying crypto is unstable. I'd much rather have higher fees than an unpredictable "currency" like bitcoin that could be worth 50% less one month than when it was collected.
(Not literal cash in most cases - postal money order or personal check. Most banks will cut and mail a paper check as part of online bill pay for free. The unbanked and anyonmous can send cash.)
I think this is a consequence of the nature of the tech industry. It is acceptable to lure customers in with ultra favorable terms, operate at a loss until your consumers are captive, potentially destroying competitors in the process, then gradually exploit your increasingly unhappy userbase.
I imagine we have had anti-anticompetitive laws against at least some of these practices for decades, but the old farts responsible for legislation and justice are slow to catch up to tech's tricks.
I'm still miffed that Firefox (et al) nuked the RSS feed button in the URL bar. RSS has a lot of problems, but we could have improved it instead of just giving up entirely in the face of shitty closed platforms like FB, Twitter, etc.
You know, I never really thought about it this way, but the way you worded it is perfect.
I talk about the "good old days" of the Internet, and it always comes down to Facebook ruining everything. I'd pin it around 2012. You're spot on though - Facebook outright murders internet culture. God, I despise that company and what it stands for so much.
Prior to its attempt to dominate media sharing on the internet, most of the content I saw on Facebook was created by people I know, about their personal lives. People share far less content of that sort now, and the algorithm doesn't prioritize it when they do. Personal updates from people I actually know are probably reduced by an order of magnitude from a decade ago.
If I want to see funny stuff, cat videos, news, political memes, pictures of food, or anything else of that sort, reddit serves much better than Facebook. Nothing has come along to fill the gap for many-to-many personal updates though, and I miss that. There's a startup opportunity here. The hard part isn't technical - something resembling the Facebook of a decade ago wouldn't be hard to build - but attracting a critical mass of users would be a significant challenge.
I don't know what happen, maybe there's no money in this service maybe people simply got bored with each other's ordinary life.
As a result, the algorithm is less likely to show my friends if I post a picture of my lunch, we're less likely to have a conversation in the comments about recipes or restaurants, and I'm less likely to bother posting the next one.
I've joked a lot about "YouTube Voice" (I didn't invent the idea) where people often seem to talk with a similar cadence and you can see the shift over time in their videos the longer they spend on the platform.
Ad revenue and eyeballs don't correlate well across different platforms, as some are better at selling ads than others.
All or nothing partnerships between startups and giant companies have been toxic/fatal in many cases since the days of vacuum tubes. They can work nicely. But supreme due diligence and even suspicion are necessary along the way.
I was never privy to the numbers, but I know carrying the salaries is a huge burden. As a user, proprietary software will often lag off the shelf features by many years because the teams are smaller and they're focusing on things off-the-shelf doesn't do. That's assuming it's well managed.
On the user side of video content: I'm not the biggest fan of YouTube, but bespoke websites can often lack features that keep me from sharing content (wont work on phone, preroll gets stuck, can't link to timestamp). SNL used to only host clips on NBC.com which I could never get to work. They started serving them on Hulu, which was only slightly better. YouTube has been significantly better.
The focus is always spending time/money on the unique thing your company can provide. In addition, like you're saying, be aware of owning as much as possible of your stack--but spreading yourself too thin or trying to run your business the same way you did 10 years ago can bankrupt you, too.
Beyond a couple of viral videos, I don't think I've ever watched anything else from them, so I can't say I know what their competitive position was. I do know that the quality of their video platform was not the issue.
Right around that same time (2008) we were using Linux and YouTube stopped working because we had trouble getting a 64-bit Flash plugin--which is/was heavily used for reference. I remember reading up on the inconsistent video format support between browsers. Flash never worked on iPhones yet YouTube had an app on day one.
I'm sure they were pulled to Facebook because of the fake numbers, but I imagine the burden of maintaining their own platform might have pushed them as well. I'm a bit curious if the recent push away from YouTube and building your own platforms will be successful now that a lot of that tech has settled and infrastructure like CDNs and compute is more commoditized.
Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook. They took a calculated market risk and the gamble didn't pay off (and they don't have enough reserve capital to survive a failed gamble). In an ideal market, the back-stop on this behavior would be "Nobody trusts Facebook's self-reported numbers moving forward."
Is that a sufficient back-stop, or should there be (further) government intervention?
Yep. Their mistake was they believed the hype. A bunch of publishers did. "Facebook is the future!" and 90% of newsrooms started pushing their original content to Facebook, sacrificing their own ad views.
Fortunately, most of the big J players have seen the folly in this already and reversed course. Usually they build their own platform because they have many media properties. But I see a lot of small market and independent publishers still stuck in the "Facebook is king" mentality because of middle managers who are still stuck in the old echo chamber.
I actually disagree. Both Facebook and YouTube were almost certainly causing video view numbers on video websites like these to decrease.
The problem is: what do you do? You can pivot to YouTube or Facebook and become a sharecropper like the 9 zillion other sharecroppers or ... die.
While people complain that CollegeHumor should have held out, I don't see anybody who held out doing any better.
Having seen both the performance and ad-blast of Cracked's website, I can understand why. FB and YT are a better user experience.
This is fraud and Facebook employees should feel threatened about going to jail. This was not a sleazy sales pitch. This was outright fraud to convince content producers that they were making more money than they actually were.
Aside: If Google Was a Guy series is one of the funniest things online.
A lot of their efforts just don't land very well. Compare this to say RoosterTeeth (Red vs. Blue, RWBY and others) has done very well in terms of adapting overall, including a couple movie releases (not huge, but out there).
Facebook should certainly be held responsible for their part, but let's not let CollegeHumor of the hook. In the end, they are responsible for their business, and moving to an unproven platform is very risky no matter what promises FB sales people tell you.
Having said that, if you're CollegeHumor, what you can't do is abrogate responsibility for your business decisions, one of which is risking your entire business on an unproven video platform based on the promises of FB salespeople. You still have a responsibility to validate the platform and not just be a fully trusting stooge. It's like a pedestrian crossing the street when the light is green. The pedestrian should still look both ways, even if they are in the right because it's no consolation to be dead and correct.
https://fortune.com/2019/10/07/facebook-lawsuit-settlement-i...
It's likely that CH specifically erred in acting overly bullish on early numbers back from FB, seeing the view trend they wanted to capitalize on what seemed to be a very strong market and be an early entrant - FB vastly inflated their numbers but even without that aiming to dominate an early market is always quite risky due to the lack of proof around the long term stability of the market... that sort of over-investment would usually result in a contraction to appropriate size along with a loss of fluidity for a company, it's only game ending when the market is committing outright fraud.