Online Publisher Dependent Upon Facebook Shuts Down, Blaming Algorithm Change (2018)
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
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Here’s how utterly clueless Speiser was about getting into bed with Facebook. In June 2016, he told The Wall Street Journal there was no reason for publishers to be nervous about Facebook:
Media companies are increasingly nervous about Facebook. While many now rely heavily on the social network to drive traffic to their content and to help generate revenue from their audiences, some media executives still question Facebook’s long-term commitment to helping their businesses.
But according to Joe Speiser, chief executive of “feel-good” content publisher LittleThings, those concerns are unfounded. Facebook wants to control the experience users have on its platform, he said, but Facebook needs publishers just as much as publishers need Facebook.
“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.”
It is funny to read someone who has advocated developing for iOS for a decade to say things like this with no irony.
If Apple decides they like your app and want to copy it's features into their own app or iOS itself then you're 100% fucked.
In general, relying on the good will and unchanging rules of a 3rd party platform for your business is inherently risky.
This is why a company being too much bigger than its clients is an antitrust issue regardless of market share; B2B competition isn't the only thing that matters. A market must respond to signals from consumers to be healthy, and it won't do that if the individual customers are insignificantly small compared to the companies in that market. In such a market, collusion between the market leaders becomes more valuable than competition.
Content producers and Facebook users aren't the clients. Advertisers are the clients, people are the product.
I also think that calling something thought-terminating can, itself, be thought terminating. In this case, a way of dismissing a commonly made point under the assumption that I have not thought through the issue on a much deeper level, but I have done so. We may simply disagree on our conclusions.
Like any business, they have to maintain a good relationship with their suppliers. In this case they have to provide a platform that users return to over & over again. But they optimize their business towards revenue generation, not suppliers.
They are producing (in my view) low quality, ad heavy, list style, click bait articles copying FB/IG/Twitter images and content that CAN ONLY EXIST inside of the Facebook feed. Their business model relies on creating clickable/likeable headlines and images that the FB algorithm shows to millions of people so a handful will click through to visit the site and make them ad revenue and a sprinkling promoted/paid for ‘news’ articles.
The algorithm may have killed them but it made them too. The real problem is that this kind of drivel is forcing out real news stories, in-depth original articles, opinion pieces, proper product reviews and well written blogs.
I don't want to put hundreds of hours into something and then an algorithm changes, the policies of the platform change (or its direction), or it simply shuts down.
I believe in some cases it makes sense to self-host and go bespoke.
For a book, other ways of advertising are effective, so you're reasonably independent. For news and other small pieces of content, it's much harder to avoid dependence on big aggregators.
As others have said, it is insanity to invest time and money into a business that is partly controlled by somebody that you have exactly zero control over. Same as having a single supplier or a single customer.
This is a large part of why eBay favours the buyer[†]. Yes, they need sellers, but if you stop selling the buyers don't go away so someone else will take your position in their market (no change for eBay overall) or increased competition will increase prices (so eBay make the same despite lower sales due to % of sale based fees).
People buying from sellers using eBay as a platform are the more treasured resource, much the same as the people reading from publishers who are using facebook as a platform, and the same dynamic exists in many other places. Only when a resource is truly both in specific demand and scarce does this situation reverse.
[†] or at least it feels that way to most sellers, buyers still sometimes feel shafted too though that are shafted less than sellers.
People think I need this or feel entitled to my attention? o my?
Sorry.
I'd have thought that the instinct for self-preservation would be more common, but that's not the first time I was wrong.
Or google.
Or Apple.
Or any platform.