After deleting news from the News Feed, Facebook is trying to gain additional traffic from journalistic channels.
Today, Facebook will unveil the “News” tab. The project is already supported by around 200 publishers. Among them: The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed News. No one seems to have learned their lesson from using the platform.
When you build on someone else's land, don't be surprised to see bulldozers. And really, given Facebook's history with publishers, no one should be surprised.
Let's look at history a little and learn from it:
In 2007, before news became a priority for Facebook, it launched a developer platform, leading to the creation of companies like Zynga. Once spam started flooding the News Feed, Facebook shut down the platforms Zynga was using. Then games began migrating to standalone mobile apps, but Zynga never fully recovered.
In 2011, Facebook launched its open graph platform with Social Reader apps that auto-share news articles you read with friends. Publishers like The Guardian and the Washington Post competed to build these apps and see how many viral articles they published.
But in 2012, Facebook changed the design of its news feed and the companies lost most of their users. With this and other things, journalism companies started to close their apps and Facebook started to abandon yet another platform.
In 2015, Facebook launched Instant Articles, hosting news content within its app to load faster. But the platform’s strict rules that limited ads, subscription signup boxes, and republishing channels led publishers to abandon Instant Articles. By the end of 2017, many publishers had abandoned the platform.
In late 2015, Facebook began a “video shift,” reporting 1 billion video views per day. As a result, the news algorithm began prioritizing videos, and daily views (according to the company) rose to 8 billion in a single year. Naturally, news pages shifted their staff and resources from text to video.
But after a lawsuit, it was revealed that Facebook was changing video viewing metrics by 150 to 900 percent.
By the end of 2017, Facebook had cut 50 million hours of daily viewing (more than 2 minutes per user) from viral videos and later allowed publishers to pay for Live videos, as its algorithm generally abandoned publisher videos in favor of content from friends.
In 2018, Facebook announced that it would reduce the presence of news in the News Feed from 5% to 4%, and that it would prioritize posts from friends and family. Referrals shrank sharply as Google took over as the top referrer, while some companies were hit hard, like Slate, which lost 87% of its traffic to Facebook. So there are some publishers who feel abandoned.
Facebook typically defends its strategy by saying it does what's best for its users. What it doesn't say is how it prioritizes other stakeholders.
Facebook should maintain a balanced relationship with everyone: its users, developers, companies, and advertisers. But this relationship often becomes abusive, as the company often exploits the end user who uses it, along with journalism.
Meanwhile, the relationship with advertisers is not the best. Although it is known that there is a duel with Google, Google allows Facebook to survive with incorrect measurements, while developers will have to be constantly vigilant as they have to change their approach depending on the changes of the social network platform.
Facebook's revenue doesn't come only from news, but that doesn't mean it doesn't care about news. But history shows a fragility in all the relationships the largest social network has built.
Will Facebook's new addition be sustainable, or is it just another firework? Once again, I have to repeat that Facebook has not earned the trust of the people.
