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I say the same about largest media company in the world. It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook. And in their case not just in the world, but the
by debt 9y ago
I say the same about largest media company in the world.
It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook.
And in their case not just in the world, but the largest media company in history by a very wide margin. People don't see any connection between William Randolph Hearst and Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook really has the best PR team.
- freehunter 9y agoWell the difference is that Facebook is an aggregator and doesn't actually publish or write any of their own content. They're a media company, sure, but they're not directly comparable to newspapers or cable news outlets.
- TremendousJudge 9y agoGoogle doesn't make the ads either, they just publish them on their platform
- rootlocus 9y agoFrom a consumer point of view, Facebook is pretty much a news source. For some even the only news source.
- lugg 9y agoExactly what do newspapers and cable news have in common with each other that Facebook doesn't?
- shkkmo 9y agoThey pay reporters.
- vuln 9y agoFacebook employs moderators.
- coloredtopbar 9y agoIn other words: Facebook doesn't employ journalists, certainly not to do journalism.
- Godel_unicode 9y agoYou don't see a difference between a moderator and a reporter in terms of content creation?
- PeterisP 9y agoQuite many of them don't, many (most?) not-top newspapers re-publish news gathered by others; many (most?) cable companies don't produce any news content themselves but just provide access to a bunch of news channels. Those still are media companies.
- reaperducer 9y ago> many (most?) not-top newspapers re-publish news gathered by others If you're referring to AP and other news services, they pay quite a lot for that, so the reporters are paid. Also, they contribute their own stories from their paid reporters to the service for other members to share.
- debt 9y agoFacebook is an editor(like at a newspaper), except in this case editorial control is determine by billions of users and a completely opaque "News Feed" algorithm. Remember, people don't just share articles, they share articles with their commentary.
- dredmorbius 9y agoChannel matters FAR more than content. ("Content is king" was always a distraction. And that came from Sumner Redstone (Viacom), not Bill Gates, who only quoted it.)
- bzbarsky 9y agoIn a world in which any piece of content you want to exist does exist because someone is written it (and we're a lot closer to that world now than in Hearst's day), power lies not in production of content but in control over which content actually gets seen.
- dbbk 9y agoThey do though, Facebook Watch is them funding original content.
- hammock 9y agoMight it not be Google?
- gumby 9y ago> I say the same about largest media company in the world. Indeed. I was just reading about the local broadcast rules (specifically: Sinclair broadcasting wants to buy Tribune media, and the FCC appears to be saying 'go ahead".) . Some people are concerned that this violates rules against concentration of ownership in broadcast stations. But doesn't Facebook operate in essentially 100% of US markets? Should we even care who owns the TV broadcasts?
- gech 9y agoTwo wrongs make a right?
- reaperducer 9y agoThe rule was made because radio waves (broadcast) is a finite resource, and so there are a limited number of players who can compete. The internet can, theoretically, have an unlimited number of competitors, so it's not regulated the same way.
- gumby 9y agoSure, that mattered in the 1930s but does it really matter any more?
- reaperducer 9y agoAre there suddenly unlimited over-the-air frequencies available to broadcasters?
- gumby 9y agoNo, but there are so many channels of info these days OTA broadcast is a minor part of it. In addition the economics of the business lead to increasing amounds of network content rather than expensive locally generated content on the airwaves. And in fact OTA is much less common than watching local channels mixed in with otehr channels on cable, so again the local channels aer drowned out. Looking up the stats a couple of weeks ago during a different HN discussion I was shocked how popular TV still is across all demographics, but local content was a plummeting percentage of the total.