Narrative: Facebook's Power
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Facebook faces increased publisher resistance to Instant Articles – Digiday (Apr 11, 2017)
There’s some good reporting here about publishers starting to pull their content back from Facebook’s Instant Articles. When it first launched, I think publishers were at the very least keen to experiment with it, and in many cases felt they had little choice but to participate out of fear that non-IA content would be deprioritized by Facebook’s News Feed algorithms. That publishers (including the New York Times) are starting to pull back is a sign both that the format is underperforming badly and that content owners have confidence that they can buck Facebook’s first party platform without negative consequences. That’s a good counterpoint to all the stories about Facebook’s power and how little choice content owners have about publishing to Facebook natively. It remains to be seen whether these publishers will see the same monetization and traffic now as they did before IA debuted, because if that’s the comparison organizations are making they may be disappointed. But all this also explains why Facebook has been working so much harder lately to cater to news publishers in particular, with its Journalism Project, new calls to action and subscription (though not paid subscription) options, and listening tours. It’s clearly worried that it’s losing the battle here and needs to do more.
via Digiday
Facebook Hit 5 Million Advertisers By Turning Users Into Marketers – Forbes (Apr 10, 2017)
Facebook is using a milestone of 5 million advertisers to talk about its efforts to attract small and medium-sized businesses as customers, and it appears Sheryl Sandberg has been doing the rounds talking to various publications about the effort. They key points here are that this number has been growing rapidly – up from 4 million last September and 3 million just over a year ago – and that it’s still just a fraction of the 65 million businesses that have Pages on Facebook. Facebook’s big advantage here is that building websites is the sort of thing no small business wants to do because it’s either hard or costly (or both) to build and maintain, and the results often aren’t that great anyway, so using a Page instead has enormous advantages – it’s easy to build and maintain without any technical knowledge, and it’s in the place where your customers likely already spend a lot of time each day. Adding very targetable advertising on top is therefore an easy sell for businesses who already use their Pages as one of their main ways to attract and communicate with customers, and much of Facebook’s growth over the last few years has come from getting deeper and deeper into that base of companies already using Facebook to promote themselves organically. Twitter, by contrast, has suffered recently in part because it hasn’t been able to break through into this segment and therefore has had to focus on the larger advertisers rather than enabling a much longer tail of more automated buying by smaller businesses, hence its very high sales and marketing cost relative to revenues (over a third of revenue vs. 13-15% at Facebook over the past year).
via Forbes
Facebook will use photo matching to stop revenge porn from being shared – The Verge (Apr 5, 2017)
This is probably about as much as Facebook can be expected to do on an issue such as this – there’s no easy definition for revenge porn as such, and therefore no way to train a computer to look for it, so the only way Facebook can police it is to match images being shared with ones it’s been told about in the past. That’s obviously far from solving the issue, but it’s a start and should help with cases where the same images are being shared over and over.
via The Verge
Facebook Shows Users More Content Which Doesn’t Come From Your Friends – TechCrunch (Apr 3, 2017)
Almost exactly two months ago, I wrote in my Techpinions column that Facebook’s next big opportunity was finally stepping beyond the idea of showing users only content shared by their friends, and using AI and machine learning to show them other content like content they’d previously engaged with. Doing this, I said, would dramatically expand the amount of interesting content that could be shown to users, thereby keeping them on the service for longer, and giving Facebook more time and places to show ads. And as I wrote almost exactly a year ago, this is just another consequence of Facebook becoming less of a social network and more of a content hub. Today, we’re seeing Facebook not only roll out a video tab (and a video app for TVs) with suggested videos, but also now testing a dedicated tab for recommended content of all kinds in its apps. This is yet another extension of Facebook’s increasing absorption of activity from across users’ lives into its various apps in an attempt to capture more of users’ time and advertisers’ dollars, and I suspect it’ll work pretty well if it’s managed right. Of course, it’s demonstrated several times lately that it’s somewhat lost its touch in that department, so it will need to proceed carefully in pushing forward in this area to avoid alienating users.
via TechCrunch
Social Media is Absorbing Other Media Consumption on Phones – Axios (Mar 22, 2017)
I’ve changed the headline here to get at what I see as the key takeaway from this data, which is that social media is absorbing other forms of media consumption on phones. As standalone categories, multimedia, news, IM, and so on show up further down the list, but of course social media – by which I suspect we mostly mean Facebook and to a lesser extent Snapchat, Instagram and so on – increasingly includes those things. That’s where that consumption now increasingly happens, rather than in dedicated apps for consuming news, video, and so on. I’ve argued for a while now that Facebook is these days as much a content hub that happens to rely heavily on friends for the content rather than merely a social network, and to me this data confirms that.
via Axios
Instagram to Let Users Book With Businesses in Challenge to Yelp – Bloomberg (Mar 22, 2017)
Instagram has had buy buttons and other e-commerce features for a while now, but it looks like it will be adding an appointment booking feature soon too, in another attempt to allow company accounts to turn viewing of pictures into actual business. It’s been fascinating to watch how Instagram has been able to turn something as simple as a photo stream into something much more like a shop window for brands, something that was inspired at least in part by how certain merchants in emerging markets were using the platform even before Instagram added these features formally. The headline here mentions Yelp as a target, but of course many of these businesses themselves compete with Amazon and other big online retailers, and so these features also enable smaller businesses to punch somewhat above their weight in that fight.
via Bloomberg
Facebook’s new ‘Town Hall’ feature helps you find and contact your government reps – TechCrunch (Mar 15, 2017)
This Town Hall feature from Facebook feels like a natural outgrowth of some of the things Mark Zuckerberg talked about in his recent manifesto. My big worry about that manifesto was that, while it acknowledged some of the problems that had grown out of Facebook’s increasing power over our lives, it seemed to think the solution was more Facebook, not less of it. This tool, for now, looks like a positive step, in that it merely helps connect people in the US with their local and federal representatives – so far, so good. But in the context of some of the things in Zuckerberg’s manifesto about Facebook facilitating new forms of local democracy, I worry that the company has bigger plans for the platform which would insert Facebook more directly into the democratic process. Definitely worth watching closely.
via TechCrunch
Facebook failed to remove sexualised images of children – BBC News (Mar 7, 2017)
Just when Facebook seems to be making progress with news organizations, it does something like this: reporting the BBC to the police for “sharing” child pornography in an effort to push Facebook to take the content down. The BBC’s reporting here is just vague enough that it’s possible that the images that weren’t taken down despite being reported really don’t contravene Facebook’s policies, but this certainly isn’t a good look for Facebook, which should be doing everything it can to stamp out child pornography and images of child abuse on the site, rather than obstructing investigations into it. And it certainly shouldn’t be doing ridiculous things like reporting journalists to the police under such circumstances.
via BBC News
Facebook is on a big listening tour for local media — and publishers are actually happy – Mashable (Mar 6, 2017)
When Facebook announced its Journalism Project a few weeks ago (and hired Campbell Brown to take a leadership role within it), it said all the right words about wanting to partner with news organizations and help them be successful. But the problem with platforms like Facebook and Google is those promising words have often rung hollow as they’ve subsequently pursued initiatives and products which ended up threatening rather than helping the media industry, and news sites in particular. It’s heartening, then, to see that Facebook seems to be engaging in a fairly genuine way with news organizations, and actually listening to them and their concerns. This article also suggests that these organizations are responding positively to some of the new ad options Facebook is introducing (though of course it remains to be seen how Facebook users respond to things like a higher ad load in Instant Articles and mid-roll video ads). It’s early days still, but there are at least some signs that Facebook means what it says about partnering in healthier ways with content partners.
via Mashable
Pirate Soccer Streams Thrive on Facebook – El Pais (Feb 21, 2017)
There have been a couple of stories recently about Facebook finding ways to detect and either crack down on or monetize pirated music on the platform, but this analysis from Spanish newspaper El Pais demonstrates that music is far from the only thing being pirated regularly on Facebook. It appears that there are massively popular streams – the article cites a recent game between Barcelona and Real Madrid where one stream alone had 700,000 viewers – which go largely unchecked on Facebook. The key to their success is that users follow Pages which post links to streams hosted by other entities – because the aggregators themselves never infringe on any copyright, they can build big audiences and merely direct them at whatever streams are available. As Facebook gets ever more serious about video on the platform, it’s going to have to get better at detecting infringing live streams in real time, especially if it wants to win the trust of traditional broadcasters.
via El Pais (in Spanish)