That world existed pre-Facebook, but speaking as someone formerly in media, Facebook has become a very worthy successor to Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extingu

That world existed pre-Facebook, but speaking as someone formerly in media, Facebook has become a very worthy successor to Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. Media used to live and die on search engine traffic. SEO was king, getting ranked in searches was how you thrived. Once Facebook (and to a much smaller extent, Twitter) showed up, it became about the all-important share. Facebook worked very hard to make sure that people consumed a vast majority of their news and media diet through Facebook itself, and consumption patterns heavily changed as a result. Facebook became the 9000lb gorilla driving your traffic, and the extent to which you lived and died depended on how much money you were willing to put towards paid promotion of your content. They even built out ecosystems like Facebook Instant Articles, which move content off the publisher's platform and directly into Facebook. With the newsfeed algorithm changes, media companies are left with an audience that doesn't use search and can't get contact with their articles via the channel they previously used to. Traffic is just gone, and it's going to kill a lot of already-struggling publishers as a result.