NEWS 29

Finally, publishers realise audience growth is not everything

SUMMARY:

Until last week I was wondering where all the media business model naysayers had gone. It seemed like we were overdue a new round of articles proclaiming: “the media is dying! And then it all came down the same day. Just as Facebook was presenting the next wave of sharing services (ways for them to own and control even more time and attention) rumours were spreading thatBuzzFeed was hitting some significant hurdles in their model. While the platform grows from strength-to-strength the publisher can only make a big splash now and again.The result is a revised perspective on how important user growth is for media companies. Rafat Ali, formerly of media insider publication paidContent, wrote a powerful manifesto of sorts titled The End of Scale.

FACTS:

• Voices like Rafat’s aren’t asking anyone to defend the many ways they’ve had to coerce people into supporting them, whether indirectly through viral distribution or directly through paywalls.
• It seems that social platforms like Facebook don’t have to convince people to spend their time, attention and even their money there.
•  Facebook only needs to dig a path for the snowball to travel. They are doing something special, and anyone can be forgiven for trying to play that game.
• The tone of media criticism is much more even, and rightfully so. It’s not the end. Far from it.

Facebook is worried about users sharing less – but it only has itself to blame

SUMMARY:

Facebook is worried that its more than one billion daily users are sharing less with one another. It’s not that we are sharing less overall; we’re still sharing lots of links to news articles and commentary, cat pictures, and hilarious Vines. But instead, adedicated team at Facebook is trying to work out why we are sharing less about ourselves. After more than a decade of picking up “friends” – everyone from your BFF to your grandmother to that guy who lived down the hall in your dorm way back in your first year of college (what’s his name again?) – we’ve decided that maybe we’re not 100% comfortable sharing intimate details of our lives with such random and disparate groups of people. Or, maybe we’re just all on Snapchat now – another major anxiety of Facebook’s.

FACTS:

• A situation where people aren’t sharing is anathema to Facebook’s business model, which uses our personal information to fuel its targeted advertising and marketing engines.
• Facebook’s response to this problem has been to build new tools for sharing, such as the newly announced live video, instead of better tools for managing privacy – demonstrating Facebook’s prioritization of companies and brands at the expense of the needs and safety of individual users.