The Liquid Audience
Worrying about Facebook is a staple of media apocalypse pornography, but the focus on Facebook subsuming media audiences is, if you can believe it, too optimistic. If you are a media organization or publisher in the contemporary era, Facebook already has your audience; if you’re lucky, there is significant overlap. But more to the point: You are, and have been for some time, instead competing for a minuscule portion of Facebook’s audience, which as of September 2015 was reported as over a billion daily active users. Peeling away a tiny fraction of that attention would make the entire month, quarter, or even annual audience goal for a significant majority of individual media concerns, and even some networks. The anxiety around getting so much traffic from Facebook comes from viewing it as a fragile dependency, fraught with future compromise. That could be so, if Facebook cared about such things. If publishers want to make their content more Facebook-friendly, well sure, that’s fine with Facebook. But long-term, if jockeying for position at the nether end of the Facebook delivery pipe degrades the operations of a publisher or the media industry in general, that will likely be unintentional and perhaps even undesirable to Facebook.
This is because Facebook doesn’t really want your audience. For most people reading this, your entire audience would vanish into Facebook’s without a ripple. What Facebook wants is your money.
In the first nine months of 2015, Facebook reported earning over $12 billion, mostly from advertising (they do still make money from games like FarmVille, after all). This sounds like a lot, and it is. However, it’s “only” about 3% of the nice round $600 billion total annual spend on advertising in the known universe. By contrast, more than 70% of online adults are already using Facebook. Even with almost unlimited resources at your disposal, what’s more seductive: scrabbling for that last stubborn 30% of humans, or tearing off great steaming hunks of that fetchingly vulnerable 97% of $600 billion?
Platform content programs like Facebook’s Instant Articles — allowing external publishers to format their content in a fast-loading Facebook-friendly way — are presented as efficiency initiatives and partnership outreach, and those can be sincere rationales. It’s certainly true that Instant Articles will serve as a petri dish for the evolution of the article as a presentational form in digital. Facebook is publicly congenial about the commercial potential of Instant Articles, encouraging its star chamber of early publisher participants to use Facebook’s revenue system to monetize them, or even to sell them externally and keep all the cash. You do you, media! But rest assured that a very expensive observational apparatus, programmatic and otherwise, will pay close attention to what kind of money Instant Articles attract. If the market responds positively and publishers can sell them, so can Facebook, and they can do it seamlessly, at a lower price, and with deeper data. Even if Instant Articles turn out to be a dud, Facebook will have the results and resources to iterate on to the next thing, with or without publisher involvement. External partners in a failed platform experiment don’t learn anything they didn’t already know and fear to be true.
This method of collaboration, imitation, and competition was perfected by YouTube, who over a couple short years co-opted and almost exterminated the multi-channel network (MCN) as a viably independent business concept. The MCNs, such as VeVo (partly owned by Google), Fullscreen, Machinima, and Maker Studios, aggregate the ad inventory of large numbers of YouTube channels, in theory selling them more effectively and expensively than YouTube’s largely blind programmatic buys. (Full disclosure: I worked at Maker Studios for a hot second between Maker acquiring my previous employer, Blip, and Maker selling itself to the Walt Disney Co.) YouTube happily supported this industry long enough to learn and internalize its methods of channel and inventory management, then casually strangled most of those companies in which it had no stake. As YouTube inexorably eroded their business, most MCNs either sold themselves or diversified their business to focus on other things besides shared ad revenue from YouTube.
In this example, it doesn’t matter to YouTube if the MCNs find a way to stay in business. YouTube didn’t need to take control of their audience, which it already possessed; YouTube wanted to take a larger percentage of their revenue stream. Or even all of that revenue. The comparison to Facebook’s relationship to publishers is inexact, but it’s instructive as a dynamic. In fact, despite all this, publishers are in a better position to finesse their future relations with Facebook because Facebook is too big and slow to become a publisher in its own right.
Like any platform of such scale, Facebook cannot credibly serve its whole audience with any particular content offering. The entire output of the New York Times won’t plausibly appeal to a majority of Facebook’s billion-plus audience. If all those people wanted to read that stuff, then the Times would have a billion readers on its own website. This may be why “top publishers” have seen a decline in Facebook referrals this year, while Facebook itself claims it’s sending more traffic to publishers generally. Facebook needs a diverse and constantly changing menu of content inputs to keep its global audience scrolling and clicking, and not even all the “top publishers” combined can provide that.
Facebook does not want to bring all that publishing mess in-house, operationally. But if Facebook’s encroachment on others’ advertising revenue causes media industry turmoil, well, them’s the breaks. One could foresee a future where Facebook buys distressed media companies simply to keep them afloat, nominally independent, and with minimal expectations of individual performance. Facebook as a tech-powered Viacom, News Corp, or Conde Nast even.
Traditional media conglomerates have long had to deal with subsidiaries reporting on them. Other than principled absolutes, there’s no roadmap for negotiating a properly adversarial (or even clinically objective) journalistic approach toward one’s employer that both reporter and subject are comfortable with. I don’t know how Facebook would react to a Facebook-owned newspaper reporting on its shenanigans; I can speculate how Jeff Bezos might react to the Washington Post reporting hostilely on Amazon, but perhaps that’s unfair to all concerned.
I would like to think that if tech owns media, then tech-owned media should be old-school brutal in its honesty and sincere insistence on its right to report on tech. The current tech industry media, arising as it largely has from a fascination with tech rather than a fascination with reporting, cannot (barring some notable exceptions) be counted on to do much other than service its clientele. No help will be forthcoming there.
The only defense I can conceive is for media to do what Facebook cannot or will not, which is to focus on producing distinctive work, at speed and without compromise. Just as most audiences could disappear into Facebook, so could most advertising budgets. But perhaps surprisingly, human beings are ultimately in charge of ad spending. They know they can, and should, spend money on Facebook. But they don’t want to only do that. They mostly want what everyone wants, which is to work with people who are making quality things, different things, new things, cool things, unique things. They’d like to spend some money on that too, maybe more than you’d think. Facebook and Google have a lot of the money, but if this wasn’t true, they’d already have all of it. Publishers who can provide what Facebook can’t — striking original work of recognizable editorial quality and creative courage — will always have an advantage in dealing with humans rather than algorithms. The challenge is to make this distinction as clear on the business side as on the editorial side.
It’s weird and counter-intuitive to consider one of the most cash-flush companies on the planet lusting after media money, given how we’re accustomed to thinking of media living forever hand to mouth — how the coffers of even comparatively rich publishers seem laughable compared to tech’s endless liquidity. But imagine it not as the raw dollar amounts media currently receives, but rather as established channels of money that Facebook wishes to stand athwart and follow to their sources, productizing and expanding to catch all it can. From Facebook’s perspective, publishers have no more right to their money than they do to their audiences. Perhaps even less.
BuzzFeed seems pleased to publish directly on platforms beyond its own website. So where is BuzzFeed, then, if no longer on buzzfeed.com? If you do the same, where is your publication? You want to be wherever your audience is, like on Facebook. But isn’t that really Facebook’s audience? Do you own or rent those people? To whom do they really belong, to whom are they ultimately loyal? It’s a little blurry, and getting more so.
But your money isn’t blurry at all. It may sound inelegant or mercenary, but your publication arguably only manifestly exists where it earns. Whether it’s the pressure of Facebook poaching ad revenue or acquiring media companies outright, the existential threat Facebook poses to media is more about money than mindshare. The latter, they already have in abundance.
