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Facebook and the Media Have an Increasingly Landlord-Tenant Style Relationship
- d4rti 11y agoIf your business is dependent on Facebook you need a plan for if all that traffic goes to 0. It's happened to the news media, it's happened to games on Facebook, it will happen again. Like the scorpion, it is in its nature.
- greyman 11y agoI'd like to add that it didn't happen to news media (yet). I help with SEO for one middle-sized news media, and FB traffic is up to 25%, not more. I have read that others have bigger numbers, though.
- morgante 11y agoSharecropping is a better metaphor. Facebook owns the audience (land), but they don't yet have the ability to fully satisfy (farm) that audience. So they direct traffic out to publishers who provide content to fulfill that demand. Like sharecropping, they split the revenue. Of course, there's a reason that sharecropping has a bad name: all the power is held by the owner (Facebook). They can, and probably will, shift to a model of owning the content directly. In 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised if most publishers were dead, replaced by Facebook directly paying creators. (We can already see this in television, with Netflix directly producing their own content.)
- neuromancer2701 11y agoSlightly different but similar, Comcast buying NBC and Verizon buying AOL.
- itchyouch 11y agoI think this is unlikely as facebook generating media for consumption isn't part of their core competency. It's meant more to be a platform for connecting users together. More compellingly, content generation could be owned by facebook if there was a limited set of content to generate. Farms produce some limited subset of crops (e.g. corn, rice). Netflix produces a limited set of tv shows. Netflix with only the shows that netflix creates wouldn't be as compelling without access to the other large corpus of shows. The same would be for FB. While it could be argued that FB could generate its own content, like Apple/Google apps on the app stores + other apps, I doubt that the cost/benefit of FB becoming their own content producing shop will ever be compelling enough to kick out the existing media companies.
- morgante 11y agoYou're right that Facebook will probably never completely kick out existing media companies. It'll probably follow the Netflix model more closely: building specific pieces of content which it thinks are desirable for the platform and as a competitive edge against others. One example: I envision Facebook expanding its "trending stories" feature to include a full-length in-house article about trending news.
- riskneural 11y agoWould you believe for a moment news published directly by facebook? What about the risk that they simply used your data as news? What about yesterday's fiasco, in which they digitally enabled support for fashionable Paris in geographic regions which have their own ignored tragedies?
- ethbro 11y agoI think this can be summarized into a cleaner formulation: by controlling the last mile, Facebook obtains the ability (though not the requirement) to absorb whatever components of the experience they choose. This has always been one of Microsoft and Apple's biggest strengths (though executed with varying degrees of competency at various times for both of them). Facebook isn't going to replace all existing publishers, but it very well might become a publisher for a few very profitable sub-niches / types of content. Or more likely (again, a la Microsoft and Apple) simply buy quality publishers in those niches. Because quality, but under-supported publisher + first-party FB analytics, advertising ability, & platform control = a pretty winning play.
- tracker1 11y agoSomething like Huffington Post owned by FB would be pretty powerful, and fit well within FB as an org and platform... The integration could be very clean given their understanding of your interests... there's already promoted articles, and other similar articles when you comment on something... adding in more FB control and integration could very well be a next step for them.
- braythwayt 11y ago> Sharecropping is a better metaphor. Yes. This is the metaphor I use for describing building applications within a walled garden (like iOS): You don't have users, Apple has users, you have a portion of Apple's "real estate" that you can monetize while turning over 30%, and if Apple thinks somebody else can do a better job of monetizing that real estate (including themselves), then (effectively) out you go. This is exactly what the publishers are doing: They are creating content for Facebook's users, not for their own users. They are not building an audience that happens to use Facebook to connect to their content, it's that Facebook has an audience that happens to read the publisher's content. It's Facebook's land, and the publishers till Facebook's fields at Facebook's pleasure. > In 10 years, I wouldn't be surprised if most publishers were dead, replaced by Facebook directly paying creators. This works for YouTube. If you can generate millions of views, you can get a share of the advertising revenue.
- Kinnard 11y agoZapchain is already doing this: http://zapchain.com http://zapchain.com
- vineet 11y agoI wonder what Google thinks of this - strategically. This should worry them a little. Maybe they need to create a 'Google Reader' :) [edit: fixed typo]
- benten10 11y agoSince we're talking about content distribution networks, someone please tell me Google pulled the reader down because they were secretly working on a much better version of it (NOT G+) and will release it soon, and the world will be wowed. It will be compared to the original iPhone launch.
- morgante 11y agoSeriously, the death of Google Reader drove me straight into the arms of Facebook.
- tyfon 11y agoPardon my ignorance (I don't have a facebook account), but how does facebook even remotely do the same function as google reader? Can you put in rss feeds to your front page on FB?
- morgante 11y ago> how does facebook even remotely do the same function as google reader? The problem which Google Reader solves is "show me some stories from a variety of sites which interest me." Facebook also solves this, admittedly in a rather different way, but it's still the same job to be done. > Can you put in rss feeds to your front page on FB? No. But that didn't keep me from replacing Google Reader with increase Facebook use.
- loxs 11y agoActually it does something kinda sorta similar with Facebook Pages and Groups. Especially now that lots of people write directly on their Pages instead of in a blog. You can "like" the page which is similar to following RSS. Admittedly, this is a lot different, as Facebook decides what you see. You are not guaranteed to see all the postings and you can't "save them for later". But it seems to work, at least for the bigger part of the population.
- wahsd 11y agoI'll say it can keep saying it until the day people start realizing that it was real, Zuckerberg has expressed that he wants to replace the internet with Facebook, even if just in the vast majority of people's minds and thereby essentially atrophying and starving the open internet. He is a direct threat to the internet and freedom in general and that doesn't even consider the deliberate and cooperative relationship he has with the intelligence networks to create mass surveillance systems which each individual maintains a dossier about themselves on.
- Jonanin 11y agoPlease cite a source for your comment that "Zuckerberg has expressed that he wants to replace the internet with Facebook". I highly, highly doubt it.
- sp332 11y agoThere's the Internet.org thing, which billed itself as bringing the Internet to poor people but actually only had a few partner services available. So "the Internet" was replaced with "Facebook and partners". http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/04/facebooks-internet-org-sees-defections-over-alleged-harm-to-net-neutrality/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/04/facebooks-internet-o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
- laotzu 11y ago>Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. -Marshall McLuhan
- pdkl95 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4 While Vihart is talking about youtube in this video, her discussion of Edmond Snow Carpenter's "They Became What They Beheld" is very relevant to this situation as well. (note: Marshall McLuhan may have written an early version the book) Too much medium, not enough message.
- dworin 11y agoThis sounds more like having a distributor than having a landlord. Imagine you create a craft beer. You can't build a relationship with all of the bars, restaurants, nightclubs, gas stations, convenience stores, and grocery stores that sell beer. So you sell through a distributor, who has all of those relationships. The amount of product you sell is now at the whim of that distributor. You own the product. The distributor owns the means of getting it to the audience. You can sell some direct, but not as much as the distributor can. So you go to them for volume. You can increase sales by creating a better product, so consumers demand it (i.e. high quality content). You can provide incentives to the distributor (i.e. paid ads on FB). You can do some of your own marketing to make it appear more valuable. But ultimately, you have to sell to the distributor as much as the end customer. And if you're in a popular category (content/craft beer), the more people that enter, and the more product they have, the less share of shelf-space (which is like the facebook feed) any one product is going to get.
- morgante 11y agoThe differences are two-fold: (1) There are multiple competing distributors who compete for your business. On the other hand, Facebook holds a monopoly on the time spent on its page and is incredibly dominant. (2) Distributors don't typically compete with producers, but Facebook does. It also has "owned" content (friend's updates, videos, etc.) which it can serve without giving any traffic to media producers. This gives it a much stronger negotiating advantage.
- jwatte 11y agoAnd some economists still think that "rent seeking" is not a thing :-)