The Facebook Serpent and the Content Farmer
calacanis.com
calacanis.com
> The same holds true of Google, which the FTC had dead to rights for manipulating their search results in favor of their homegrown services and AGAINST their own partners. When Google works against its own partners covertly, what would a reasonable person call it?
Or at least seems to me that way[1]. "works against its own partners covertly" it a bit presumptuous as well - certainly implies malice and intent.
To be entirely honest, I'm not sure how this article ties in with reality. Right now if you are a "content creator" you would actually be the one paying Facebook in order to simply be able to reach your own fans (Pages). Or, you simply ignore it and let your users do the Facebook-promoting for you.
While I'm not saying that the current status quo is good, how did we get from that, to Facebook paying content creators to link to their (freely available) content?
> These [content creating] companies do not need Facebook, Yahoo, Google, or Twitter — in fact, the opposite!
How so? Facebook has "the global audience" - of certain age groups, at least. It is the closest thing to an online passport. Content creators get traffic from Facebook. Facebook gets traffic because of interesting content shared. They don't "need" Facebook, but it certainly doesn't hurt them that people have a quick way to share their content with tons of people.
[1] http://nypost.com/2015/03/30/senate-may-probe-ftc-decision-t...
> The FTC’s competition staff in 2012 recommended suing Google over three practices deemed harmful to consumers and rivals, including “scraping” content illegally from other sites and restricting advertisers from placing ads with rivals.
> Instead of suing, however, the FTC reached an agreement with Google in January 2013, in which the search giant voluntarily agreed to change its practices to appease regulators.
> It is not unusual for FTC commissioners to vote against taking legal action when different divisions of the agency’s staff fail to reach a consensus, a DC source said.
Uh... huh.
Netflix's model is about, what, 95% content produced for other distribution mediums (theatrical/broadcast/cable) that Netflix is paying a relative pittance for because the marginal cost of distributing them on Netflix after they've made their money elsewhere is very small and so they don't need to bring in a lot of money from Netflix in order to be worth the distribution deal. Buzzfeed is... well, you make about $100 per article writing for Buzzfeed.[1] The median salary of a journalist in the U.S. is $37,501.[2] As a conservative estimate, let's double that -- because as a Buzzfeed frelancer you aren't getting employer medical benefits, you have to pay your own payroll taxes (anyone who's ever worked freelance/contract knows that the taxes listed on a typical paycheck are only about half of the taxes that are actually paid, depending on the breaks), you aren't getting paid vacation and sick days, you have to provide your own computer, Internet, utilities, etc. So you need to earn $75,002 as a Buzzfeed writer to match the median salary of a journalist in real terms. So you need to write 750 articles for Buzzfeed in a year in order to hit that medium salary, maybe a bit fewer if you can do some longer articles at a higher rate, but that's still about the same in terms of wordcount.
And what kind of content are these underpaid Buzzfeed writers actually cranking out? Go through and actually read the articles under BuzzFeed News on the front page. Right now, there's an article about Trevor Noah becoming the host of the Daily Show, which seems to mostly rely upon promotional materials put out by Noah on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, video of Noah on The Daily Show and his stand-up show, and a GQ cover he was on. Count up how many of those things are paid for directly or indirectly by someone else, mostly Comedy Central. The article on the Germanwings pilot seems cobbled together from AP, Reuters, New York Times and Sky News articles -- written by people making that $37,501 salary that our BuzzFeed writers aren't going to get.
The author sees "a class of independent and strong content-lead companies." I see a bunch of places that are either piggybacking off the products of other, Old Media entities or getting by on a business model that pays people below-poverty wages for content -- and sometimes both. I don't think that's independent or strong or even content-led.
1) http://whopays.scratchmag.net/?s=buzzfeed 2) http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journalist/Salary
In contrast, freebooting on Facebook is becoming an enormous problem. Facebook has a ton of hidden throttles in place which prevent external links such as YouTube from going viral; they automatically favor stolen reuploaded copies instead. Those who help Facebook to profit from this theft are rewarded with more exposure and more likes.
Silent victims are being robbed en masse like this by Facebook on a daily basis, and many will never realize it.
A recent depressing example I noticed was a video by a woman named Leslie Hall, whose entire combined view count for all of her copyrighted YouTube videos over the past nine years was around 12 million. It seems like she's poured a lot of money and effort into trying to get attention with her strange videos. Nothing ever really caught on, until finally one of her videos exploded in popularity, receiving over 16 million views in just one week - more views than all of her life's work on YouTube had ever received. Unfortunately, it was a freebooted copy on Facebook which did not even bother to include her name anywhere. People interested in seeing more of her work were unable to do so, unless they went the extra mile and performed a google search for the chorus. That's how I found her, so I emailed her to let her know she might want to send a DMCA takedown notice or something. She was extremely upset about the situation.
The same problem applies to other content theft rackets like 9gag, funnyjunk, imgur, etc. All of these companies have made millions of dollars by stealing other people's work and hiding behind the false claim that it's "too much work" to put honest effort into finding and redirecting to the true creator of anything that goes viral on their own site. Creators of webcomics are perhaps the biggest victims there. I've contacted comic creators in the past when I noticed their stolen comic going viral on one of these sites, and many have said they were silently furious any time it happened.
I believe these sites should be legally required to implement something like what Google does with YouTube, even if it's just a low-tech solution involving a single employee who sits there manually performing reverse image searches all day. As it stands, none of these companies are any more ethical than Kim Dotcom's Megaupload; the only difference is that the victims are small, scattered, and don't have hundreds of millions of dollars available to spend on bending law enforcement to their will to punish these sites that steal from them.