It's official: Facebook wants to take over the industry of professional internet publishing. After months of rumors, a report this week from The New York Times confirmed that Facebook is in talks with several publishers, including the Times, to actually host their content, instead of referring readers to their websites.
This is an incredibly good deal for Facebook and a bad one for publishers.
The idea is that when you click on a recommended article from the Times or BuzzFeed, the whole article will unfurl in your news feed, instead of linking out to an external website. Facebook's pitch is that the current user experience of switching sites is crummy, especially on mobile. Privately, Facebook may also be saying that its designers and engineers are better than the ones at your average media company.
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Facebook is looking to sweeten the deal either by sharing some advertising revenue with the publishers, or allowing publishers to sell some of their ads on content that runs within Facebook. Along the way, publishers will give up full control of the user experience for their work, as well as control of their user data. Facebook gets all that, and Facebook keeps its own users' eyes on Facebook.
Facebook is approaching these talks from a position of strength. There is no doubt that for some web publishers, Facebook is a source of tremendous amounts of traffic and therefore a source of revenue. And it looks like the company is playing serious hardball with some publishers, with Facebook referral traffic mysteriously plunging at certain websites.
Instead of paying attention to Facebook's braggadocio about creating a "seamless experience" for users, think about what even seeking such a deal admits.
Facebook is admitting that what its community of users produces on its own is basically garbage. Lots of users log on to Facebook and then click away to see content made by professionals: journalists, videographers, photographers, etc.
One of the great premises of the "social web" was that users would generate content for other users. That still could be a mightily profitable business for some companies, but apparently it isn't enough for the biggest social network of them all. It is almost certainly not enough to support a massive public company.
It appears Facebook would rather not present users with the worst mental effusions of people they haven't talked to since high school. Instead, Facebook wants to serve their users beautifully told stories and fun articles produced by The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic.
Facebook has only one way of really enhancing the "experience" of reading a news article or watching a video: personal recommendations. Personal recommendations count for a lot when they come from friends, acquaintances, ex-coworkers, and, yes, even former classmates in whom your interest is macabre voyeurism. But that means Facebook is essentially a weaponized form of word-of-mouth — certainly valuable to publishing companies, but still at bottom a referral service, not a technological or social revolution.
And it's not a surprise that Facebook is admitting this now. The proliferation of new social networks has nibbled at what were once core features of Facebook. Even the functionality that built the site into what it is has fallen into disuse. When was the last time you uploaded a big set of photographs to Facebook? 2010? Most users have moved on to other photo-sharing applications. When was the last time you went through and curated the lists of movies, books, and musicians you liked? If anything, once Facebook started using those lists to spam your newsfeed with advertisements from movie studios, you likely started deleting them, or at least "hiding" those posts from your timeline.
Even the referral business can be broken away in bits and pieces by Twitter, Digg, professional aggregators, and even the astonishing return of personalized email newsletters. Why give Facebook so much of the value you create at such a cut rate deal? Why do this when advertisers are starting to figure out that junk-clickbait content is a worthless commodity business, and when raw traffic numbers impress them less and less?
Hitching your company so totally to Facebook is actually worse than hiding your content in an exclusive mobile app. At least apps on Apple's IOS and Google's Android give your own tech teams more flexibility and functionality for presenting your work, with more options than are available on the HTML-and-JavaScript-confined web. Your own app allows you to control the user experience, and learn from user data. Facebook is using the same web technology that your company is, so its promise of a more "seamless experience" doesn't cut all that much mustard.
And there is every reason to believe that Facebook can fall apart just as MySpace and Friendster did, even after its astonishing rise to over one billion users. People join Facebook because they want to connect with friends, spy on old lovers, and look at pictures of the grandkids. But then people grow up, they become more reluctant to share on Facebook. The messages to friends go through Apple's iMessage, and the photos are shared via email or on (Facebook-owned) Instagram. The old lovers are somewhere in a pile on Tinder. Facebook isn't a platform like Apple's IOS — it's more like the direct-mail business of the internet.
When confronted with the emotional and intellectual refuse that floats around Facebook, people would rather curl up with a great magazine, a funny online quiz, or a nice story. Don't just give those away to the owner of a glorified comments section.
