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Excerpt for the "John Gruber; Didn't Click" types: ----- Here’s how utterly clueless Speiser was about getting into bed with Facebook. In June 2016, he told T
by chalst 5y ago
Excerpt for the "John Gruber; Didn't Click" types:
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Here’s how utterly clueless Speiser was about getting into bed with Facebook. In June 2016, he told The Wall Street Journal there was no reason for publishers to be nervous about Facebook:
Media companies are increasingly nervous about Facebook. While many now rely heavily on the social network to drive traffic to their content and to help generate revenue from their audiences, some media executives still question Facebook’s long-term commitment to helping their businesses.
But according to Joe Speiser, chief executive of “feel-good” content publisher LittleThings, those concerns are unfounded. Facebook wants to control the experience users have on its platform, he said, but Facebook needs publishers just as much as publishers need Facebook.
“I think we need each other. We need them for the traffic; they need us for the content,” Mr. Speiser said on this week’s WSJ Media Mix podcast. “I think [Facebook] cares very much. I think without the content all these media companies are providing there’d be that much less reason to go on to the news feed.”
18 months later exactly the thing Speiser said he wasn’t concerned about — Facebook fucking him over — forced him to shut down his company.
- Mindwipe 5y ago> Here’s how utterly clueless Speiser was about getting into bed with Facebook. In June 2016, he told The Wall Street Journal there was no reason for publishers to be nervous about Facebook: It is funny to read someone who has advocated developing for iOS for a decade to say things like this with no irony.
- chalst 5y agoIt's the difference between 30% fucked and 75% fucked.
- ineedasername 5y agoIf Apple changes its app store search algorithm you're still mostly fucked. If Apple decides they like your app and want to copy it's features into their own app or iOS itself then you're 100% fucked. In general, relying on the good will and unchanging rules of a 3rd party platform for your business is inherently risky.
- 6510 5y agoI like the part where you have to build the entire business before they will consider rejecting you.
- ineedasername 5y agoYep, if you're trying to build a new business based on an app, going for the absolute MVP to get early approval or rejection seems like a big requirement. Then just add incrementally until/unless an update gets rejected or you've built the full product. And then just hope the rules don't change.
- philipov 5y agoIn a sense, he's right that Facebook needs someone to provide content for them. But Facebook has billions of someones to do that for them. They don't need any particular someone, and there will still be plenty of someones left over even if they screw everyone over. This is why a company being too much bigger than its clients is an antitrust issue regardless of market share; B2B competition isn't the only thing that matters. A market must respond to signals from consumers to be healthy, and it won't do that if the individual customers are insignificantly small compared to the companies in that market. In such a market, collusion between the market leaders becomes more valuable than competition.
- ineedasername 5y agowhy a company being too much bigger than its clients is an antitrust issue Content producers and Facebook users aren't the clients. Advertisers are the clients, people are the product.
- philipov 5y agoThat's a popular quip, but I think it's actually a form of thought-terminating cliche. If you want, they're clients in the sense that a government torturer's victim is their client.
- ineedasername 5y agoI think that whoever is paying for something is the true client. I also think that calling something thought-terminating can, itself, be thought terminating. In this case, a way of dismissing a commonly made point under the assumption that I have not thought through the issue on a much deeper level, but I have done so. We may simply disagree on our conclusions.
- philipov 5y agoUsers of facebook are paying for something, they're just not paying for it with cash. They're paying for it with their personal data.