Facebook Puts a Downer on Upworthy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The start of the article is gold.
> A Democrat and a Republican Joined a Commission to Reform Elections. What They Did Next Will Amaze You.
>> Not really, but I figured an Upworthy headline was the best way of drawing attention to the report of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a blue/red-ribbon project that's wrapped up work one year and one day after the second Obama inaugural.
I don't know if this qualifies as clever. If people are starting to react against the style, then it may not be the best way of drawing attention. Heck, the "Presidential Commission on Election Administration" probably deserves a fresh angle rather than a hackneyed one, since the topic sounds deathly boring (like Upworthy stories tend to be).
After college I made a list of "who would I avoid (or maybe not even recognize) if I saw them out in public" and removed them from my friend list.
After that came the "baby photo" stage - if someone posted too many images that didn't interest me, I told Facebook that I wasn't interested in seeing updates from those people anymore.
Similar to the Facebook gaming spam a few years back, I simply just removed updates from any site or app that contained content I wasn't interested in seeing anything from (BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Zynga games, etc).
My newsfeed is now a finely tuned machine, where I get updates from my close circles and occasionally from news sites I enjoy.
Point being, you can virtually customize Facebook as much as you want so I'm not sure what the disconnect is here. I wouldn't expect Gmail to be perfectly tailored to my preferences the first time I created an account. I figure the same thing applies with Facebook.
Yes, I found those Upworthy posts incredibly obnoxious but obviously millions of people disagree as otherwise the posts wouldn't receive the engagement they do.
Pre-Upworthy Facebook post:
My friend: "I thought this sucked until 0:45. Then my jaw dropped."
Video embedded title: "Guy does tricks on pogo stick."
My friend: [nothing]
Video embedded title written by cynical robot:
"I thought this sucked until 0:45. Then ..."
(Oops -- deleted and reposted this because I switched browsers and accidentally logged in under an old account.)
The Problem With Facebook
Personally, the influx of links from these relatively content-less sites has really decreased the usefulness of my news feed--in fact, I get a little bothered whenever I see this stuff appear. That said, it’s evident that _someone_ wants these links to be on Facebook, given that _someone_ had to post them in the first place.
Perhaps it’s just evidence of the split between newsfeed presence and wall presence (i.e., it could be consistent to argue that those who post Upworth yadn BuzzFeed links don’t necessarily want them to gain attention beyond the Wall on which they’re posted), but I prefer to see it as a microcosm of two contrasting groups of Facebook users: one that sees Facebook as a way to share “fun”, “light” content, and another that wants it to be a meaningful exchange of personal information and ideas.
(Guess which I belong to)
Eventually I realized that it was turning my e-mail inbox into the internet version of cable news. Full of meaningless stories with bait-y titles.
Also happy there are virtually zero baby photos in my feed, and plenty of cat pictures, news stories, political debates (NSA, immigration, tax policy, guns, war), etc. It's pretty much perfect.
Basically no games or game invites; you can block individual games, but a couple people kept inviting me to new ones -- gone!
Being willing to "unfollow" or "unfriend" people who are polluting your feed goes a long way.
1. As far as Quantcast data goes, ViralNova held steady in December (https://www.quantcast.com/viralnova.com)
2. Utrend.tv grew in December (https://www.quantcast.com/utrend.tv)
3. Distractify.com grew from ~ 15m in Nov to 45m in December. (https://www.quantcast.com/distractify.com)
In other words, Upworthy clones all grew or remained steady in December while Upworthy traffic declined. I’m not going to speculate on the months after December, but to suggest that Facebook cracked down on these “viral” sites seems to go against the small amount of data that we have available via Quantcast.
It seems to me like Upworthy just had a subpar December, especially with the growth of new entrants.
Facebook is overtaking reddit in the Quality algorithm department.
The mods from quality subreddits are pretty fierce on enforcing rules against memes/low quality comments/etc.
This doesn't work on r/all, which is a great place to find new content you haven't discovered yet.
The nice thing about Reddit is that if you want some low-brow content, you can get that, too: users can easily customize what they see by selecting different subreddits, relative to Facebook.
Things change quickly in the world of startups.
In the past fb has issued domain wide bans on properties I've owned if we were getting a little too savvy in exploiting their edge rank algo.
This "pass thru" traffic is amongst the least valuable on the internet, believe me, we have tried everything under the sun to monetize visitors, adsense, every ad network, affiliate, etc.
Believe it or not the best thing we've figured out is to use the authority of a massively viral website to help us rank terms in google on the backend. All comes full circle, lol.
A little subtle humor from our friends at Bloomberg! This is the type of sly writing I'd expect from the Economist.
1) The process that drives Upworthy' success is the way they write and TEST headlines. Sure their current title types won't work forever, but they are incredibly good and testing and improving on processes. I would expect this to continue.
2) The majority of sharing (and thus traffic from) facebook is done on individual profiles (and not the organization's facebook page). One video I worked on was shared by 90,000 individuals. Accessing the profiles of that many people is the key to making FB work for any organization. This focus on the page is misguided.
Sure the reduction in reach from their fanpage will impact their ability to spark initial interest, but that's just one of the channels they use.
That's interesting, it assumes that everyone wants "high quality" over memes. Funny thing is, many people I know go to Facebook just for the memes, the high quality stuff comes from elsewhere. Facebook doesn't let the user choose?
If you claim they are, then EVERY single content publisher is building on FB's turf because they rely on people sharing their content. You can't have it both ways.
Either way my News Feed is a river of crap akin to reddit/r/pics. And then in a Kafkaesque moment I realize that this business is worth 167 billion dollars.