All Your Content Are Belongs to Facebook

or Your Editorial Distinctiveness Will Be Added To Our Own

Disclaimer: While I work at Facebook, the views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. All information contained in here comes from public accounts and my own speculation.

There are multiple reports that several publishers — among them The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and National Geographic are going to start publishing directly into Facebook instead of posting links to their websites on Facebook. While this story is making the rounds now, the seeds of it have been public since at least October. On Medium and Twitter, the media watchers are up in arms claiming this is a horrible deal to everyone except Facebook, and that the publishers are going to lose everything when The Almighty Algorithm™ changes. While I’m don’t know how good of a deal this will be for publishers, I’m not in the Chicken Little camp either.

Facebook is reported be interested in hosting publisher content because of load times on the mobile app. The reports claim that it takes 8 seconds for a remote link to load on a phone because of the need to fire up an external browser and then load the link. I’ve never timed it, but let’s assume that’s true, because frankly, there’s no reason to believe that anyone is lying about it. Facebook probably actually cares about these 8 seconds because of user experience. Interrupting the flow isn’t desirable. No one is sitting around saying, “This is good, but you know what it would make it better? If I was made to wait for almost 10 seconds before I get what I want.” Now this problem could be solved in lots of ways, embedding a browser widget inside the app and prefetching the links the links for one. So why doesn’t Facebook do this? Well, Facebook has a very Facebook-centric mentality. I suspect the thought process was something like, “If we didn’t have to launch the browser, we could save 8 seconds. So let’s host the content ourselves, it makes it much easier for us from a technical perspective.” This is what I’ll call the “What’s good for Facebook is good for everyone,” meme. It’s not malevolent. It’s at worst self-centered and self-serving, but it’s not Mr. Burns.

Once the decision to host the content was made, ads were naturally just assumed to be served on these natively hosted articles. I’m sure potential profits were calculated, because it should be obvious to everyone that if Facebook started doing this, it was going to have pay the content producers, otherwise it would quickly find itself the target of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits.

There are a lot of questions about what this means economically to the publishers that option to this deal and those that opt out, and ultimately these question revolve around one thing: money. So let’s begin.

What About The Paywalls?

Well, what about them? They’re going to stay in place, and if they aren’t leaky like nytimes.com, then they’ll become just as leaky. For the NYT, this is the status quo. For a publisher that wants a solid paywall — say the Times of London — then they shouldn’t participate.

Isn’t this Just SocialReader All Over Again?

Not at all. SocialReader was third-party app just like every other annoying app at the time (Everything from Zynga! I’m looking at you!) FB apps sucked. Every single one sucked. They slurped information from you and your friends and sent it god knows where so it could be used for ad optimization, all the while spamming you and your friends. They were horrible, and so the kibosh got put on all of them and the FB experience got better for everyone. The fact that SocialReader got picked up in the purge is unfortunate for WaPo and its partners, but that doesn’t mean that eliminating apps was a bad thing. The newsfeed algorithm doesn’t pick winners and losers with specific links or apps.

Native hosting is different. First, Facebook is a party to it, which makes it a completely different beast than apps. As I understand it (I have not seen any prototypes, and all I know is what I read in the papers), the stories will appear in a person’s newsfeed just like always, but when you click on it, it will expand to show the entire text of the article. You’ll be able reshare, like, and comment on it just like normal. If you share a nytimes.com URL, that will be detected, and instead of the appearing as a normal link share, it will be automatically converted into a natively hosted article. That’s it.

Now because it’s a different type of newsfeed item, it could be ranked different by the algorithm, but I wouldn’t expect that to happen for several months if at all. That’s getting into picking winners and loser, and FB isn’t going to put their thumb on the scale and do that. What could happen though — and what FB and their publishing partners hope for — is that the native experience is just enough better, that people click on the natively hosted articles slightly more and so natively hosted content will appear just a bit more often in the newsfeed. For FB, this means that people stay on facebook.com or in the Facebook mobile app a bit longer, and thus increasing the number of ads impressed. For the publishers, it means that the number of people that bail before the link loads goes down, and so the article is actually impressed, and the publisher gets part of the advertising revenue from Facebook.

Think about Facebook’s new native videos. Because they autoplay in the feed — unlike YouTube videos — people watch them, while YouTube takes a traffic hit, and now FB can start monetizing them by embedding their own ads on the videos. Video publishers upload native videos to FB because they want the cool new experience, and marginally more plays because the bar to watch has been lowered ever so slightly. It’s the same thing with native articles.

Since an article is going to have show compressed in the newsfeed, I don’t know how it can be made much more compelling than a regular link. However, if the abandon rate goes down as native content — as it probably will — you probably won’t have to do anything more than turn the background slightly blue or grey to give a visual hint that the article loads natively and then sit back and watch people’s behavior change to prefer natively hosted articles.

In this scenario, I would expect traffic to the participating publishers to drop through the floor since FB can account for up to 30% of a publisher’s traffic, while total number of articles read and number of unique readers goes slightly up do to the elimination of abandonment.

What About Publisher’s That Don’t Participate?

Probably nothing. I find it hard to believe that the number of people that avoid clicking a shared link, or abandon the link before it loads is really going to change. So I don’t think the nonparticipants are going to lose money by not participating. What’s more of a concern is if their participating competitors start making more money than they were before.

What’s This Going To Do To The Participating Publisher’s Traffic?

The real question is what how does this effect the participants’ ability to charge high CPMs for ads on their own websites. I can’t imagine that it helps. For many high traffic sites, Facebook is accounting for about half the traffic, and now that traffic won’t be monetized through the publisher’s own ads. More importantly, the audience for ads sold on the publisher’s website is going to drop, and that’s going to exert downward pressure on the the ad rates that nytimes.com and the rest charge. Therefore, in order to remain revenue neutral, a publisher will need to make more money per Facebook article impression than per website impression. How much more? I don’t know.. Maybe a lot. If Facebook can’t deliver the money, expect natively hosted content to be rapidly and unceremoniously dropped by publishers.

Is This A Trend?

Well it’s trendy in any case. Snapchat’s Discover is encouraging brands and publishers to create special content for the app. Buzzfeed is embracing this too-early-to-call-it-a-trend trend with its “distributed content” strategy. While superficially it sounds good to cater your content for each social media platform, producing platform exclusive content is… How can I put this delicately?… Dumb. You’re playing in someone else’s walled garden, and so that means: 1) You can’t monetize your content and B) You’re at the mercy of garden’s owner. It’s the same mistake as betting your future on a Facebook app. You will get burned.

There is one notable exception to the don’t-build-in-someone-else’s-garden rule and that’s if you get a cut of the revenue. YouTube does this with their most popular channels, and now Facebook is (probably) doing it with the natively hosted publishers. Still, the largesse can disappear at any time, and so you should have a backup plan.