4 ms·

The Facebook Reckoning

20 points by samsolomon 12y ago

dublinben 12y ago
I wish the publishers and their social network enablers luck. As a member of their target demographic, I can't help but feel they're in deep trouble. I quit Facebook when I realized most of the content it showed me was worthless. I also stopped visiting his example site (the Verge) when they abandoned their original purpose of covering technology news.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I don't even check Facebook anymore. I use their API (until the personal version goes away with 2.0) to grab photos I'm in or friend's pictures, and push it into Flickr and S3 for backups. If I want news, I'm going to Google News, reddit.com/r/worldnews, or Hacker News.
  - saurik 12y ago
    Just to point out that some people are the opposite: I gave up on reddit (which I now never look at at all: I just can't stand the people there) and started using Facebook as a news source. I follow a number of news sources I like, and many of my friends share interesting articles on the subjects they know a lot about; I then have conversations with people I know about the content of the articles, as opposed to random people, which I find much more valuable, as we slowly build up a shared knowledge of what is actually happening (as opposed to constantly feeling like I am talking with a blank slate: on Hacker News I finally decided I now just "fire and forget" comments, as otherwise it is just too frustrating to have to have the same conversations over and over again with people about complicated corner cases of subtle topics).
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      A suggestion: Use reddit for the links, and completely ignore the comments.
      - dandelany 12y ago
        Another suggestion: Stop thinking of Reddit as a community and start thinking it as a bunch of different communities. The average quality of discussion on mainstream subreddits like worldnews is pretty low, but I find it to be quite good for niche communities (eg. the games I like to play).
        klarrimore 12y ago
        this is the answer. i can't believe it when friends tell me they don't log in. /r/all is just brutal.
snowwrestler 12y ago
The author implies that publishers might take the deal because Facebook is far more powerful than they are--they have no choice. I don't think that is true at all. If you're on Facebook, look through your feed. How many of the items are personal information someone has entered into Facebook (status updates, photos, etc), and how many are published articles that someone has shared? In most feeds it is a healthy mix. A quick survey of my own showed about a 2:1 ratio in favor of published content. Shared articles are an inherent part of the value of Facebook today, which means Facebook has no leverage. They can't hurt publishers without also hurting themselves. Ask yourself this: if Facebook has all the power, why are they bothering to offer to host published content on their servers? Why not stick with the status quo, where the publishers do all the work and Facebook just serves ads? In fact, Facebook is creating this new service to help Facebook. Because, like publishers, Facebook also faces growing competition for attention. A world in which publishers self-host their own content is a world in which Facebook is just a middleman...and middlemen are easily replaced on the Internet. Readers can share links on Snapchat just as easily as they can on Facebook. Content is still king. People want interesting things to read. Publishers, not Facebook, are the companies who give them that. Facebook has to become a publisher itself in order to compete for the long term--just like Netflix is now creating its own series.
- prostoalex 12y ago
  1) If the same user visits facebook.com and some newspaper site, let's say mercurynews.com, advertisers will pay premium for the facebook.com user since Facebook most likely will show that user the most relevant ad. San Jose Mercury News does not have access to the same trove of data, and their best hope is to display some ads from San Jose realtors in an effort to do geotargeting, or just go the retargeting route and show that user an ad for headphones he checked out on Newegg a few days ago. At some point the premium for highly targeted ads is so rich that even with Facebook's cut of revenue share, the media company will make more money off the same content, than displaying it on a standalone Web page of their own. 2) Some mobile operators in some locations whitelist (or offer at a special subsidized rate) content from facebook.com. Some publishers might not be indifferent to those extra eyeballs (and potential rev share). 3) Publishers faced with same dilemma with Google News excerpt. Want to exclude your own headlines from excerpts? Go ahead, there are 15,000 competing news outlets around the world waiting in line to receive traffic from Google News. The publishing (especially news) world is becoming commoditized, and online aggregators have learned to play the content generators against one another.

20 points by samsolomon 12y ago

I wish the publishers and their social network enablers luck. As a member of their target demographic, I can't help but feel they're in deep trouble. I quit Facebook when I realized most of the content it showed me was worthless. I also stopped visiting his example site (the Verge) when they abandoned their original purpose of covering technology news.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
I don't even check Facebook anymore. I use their API (until the personal version goes away with 2.0) to grab photos I'm in or friend's pictures, and push it into Flickr and S3 for backups. If I want news, I'm going to Google News, reddit.com/r/worldnews, or Hacker News.
- saurik 12y ago
  Just to point out that some people are the opposite: I gave up on reddit (which I now never look at at all: I just can't stand the people there) and started using Facebook as a news source. I follow a number of news sources I like, and many of my friends share interesting articles on the subjects they know a lot about; I then have conversations with people I know about the content of the articles, as opposed to random people, which I find much more valuable, as we slowly build up a shared knowledge of what is actually happening (as opposed to constantly feeling like I am talking with a blank slate: on Hacker News I finally decided I now just "fire and forget" comments, as otherwise it is just too frustrating to have to have the same conversations over and over again with people about complicated corner cases of subtle topics).
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    A suggestion: Use reddit for the links, and completely ignore the comments.
    - dandelany 12y ago
      Another suggestion: Stop thinking of Reddit as a community and start thinking it as a bunch of different communities. The average quality of discussion on mainstream subreddits like worldnews is pretty low, but I find it to be quite good for niche communities (eg. the games I like to play).
      - klarrimore 12y ago
        this is the answer. i can't believe it when friends tell me they don't log in. /r/all is just brutal.

snowwrestler 12y ago

The author implies that publishers might take the deal because Facebook is far more powerful than they are--they have no choice. I don't think that is true at all. If you're on Facebook, look through your feed. How many of the items are personal information someone has entered into Facebook (status updates, photos, etc), and how many are published articles that someone has shared? In most feeds it is a healthy mix. A quick survey of my own showed about a 2:1 ratio in favor of published content. Shared articles are an inherent part of the value of Facebook today, which means Facebook has no leverage. They can't hurt publishers without also hurting themselves. Ask yourself this: if Facebook has all the power, why are they bothering to offer to host published content on their servers? Why not stick with the status quo, where the publishers do all the work and Facebook just serves ads? In fact, Facebook is creating this new service to help Facebook. Because, like publishers, Facebook also faces growing competition for attention. A world in which publishers self-host their own content is a world in which Facebook is just a middleman...and middlemen are easily replaced on the Internet. Readers can share links on Snapchat just as easily as they can on Facebook. Content is still king. People want interesting things to read. Publishers, not Facebook, are the companies who give them that. Facebook has to become a publisher itself in order to compete for the long term--just like Netflix is now creating its own series.

prostoalex 12y ago
1) If the same user visits facebook.com and some newspaper site, let's say mercurynews.com, advertisers will pay premium for the facebook.com user since Facebook most likely will show that user the most relevant ad. San Jose Mercury News does not have access to the same trove of data, and their best hope is to display some ads from San Jose realtors in an effort to do geotargeting, or just go the retargeting route and show that user an ad for headphones he checked out on Newegg a few days ago. At some point the premium for highly targeted ads is so rich that even with Facebook's cut of revenue share, the media company will make more money off the same content, than displaying it on a standalone Web page of their own. 2) Some mobile operators in some locations whitelist (or offer at a special subsidized rate) content from facebook.com. Some publishers might not be indifferent to those extra eyeballs (and potential rev share). 3) Publishers faced with same dilemma with Google News excerpt. Want to exclude your own headlines from excerpts? Go ahead, there are 15,000 competing news outlets around the world waiting in line to receive traffic from Google News. The publishing (especially news) world is becoming commoditized, and online aggregators have learned to play the content generators against one another.