What Will Facebook’s New Mission Mean for Publishers?

Publishers who have struggled to maintain revenues for years against the onslaught of Facebook’s command of the audience now must face another example of how little the site truly cares about its publisher partners.

We have been saying for a long time that there something wrong with Facebook’s measurements in the light of our own experience. And now the advent of third-party metrics has revealed that some of Facebook’s video ads have as little as 20% viewability, which is only one aspect of the measurement corrections the site has had to make over the past six months.. That’s not likely to change very soon, because Facebook does not prioritize publishers and never has. Nor, it seems does it prioritize brands, even though they pay the bills.

But Facebook has bigger problems than either publishers or brands. Now that the world has recognized it as a media company, it has governments coming after it and users accusing it of spreading fake news. It’s at once a publisher and a platform for publishers. Like Google, whose motto may be “don’t be evil,” but who has recently been fined by the EU for another kind of evil, Facebook has gotten too large to be seen favorably by everyone, and its management has to juggle a multitude of conflicting priorities.

To address what it believes is the biggest of those priorities, keeping users engaged and on the platform as much as possible, Facebook has rolled out a new strategy around groups. It is no longer enough in Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes that the world be merely connected to friends and family, it must also be brought closer together. Taking his cue from some very large groups that formed around interests such as specific diseases or leisure activities, Zuckerberg first began to talk about the value of groups.

Then in June Facebook held its first community summit and announced a change of mission. From USA Today

After a decade of promoting Facebook as a service that connects small groups of friends and family, Facebook is broadening its focus for the next decade to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

The new mandate stems from Zuckerberg’s soul searching on how Facebook should evolve to help people pull together in divisive times.

Facebook was supposed to give people a sense of common humanity. Instead critics say Facebook has played a role in increasing polarization with the spread of fake news and reinforcement of filter bubbles during contentious elections in the U.S. and overseas.

This seems to further distance Facebook from its publisher partners as it seeks its own continued growth. It also begs the question of how advertising will be served to users in groups. Making money has always been a necessary evil for Facebook, which has the attention in an economy based on attention.

Facebook, like any other company, has its own survival imperatives. Most premium publishers we know have already dedicated more resources to Instant Articles than they are getting back in revenue, and some already pulled back.

We would advise publishers to focus on their own audiences with quality content that is highly targeted and served on a well designed site that loads quickly. Depending on Facebook for driving traffic or increasing revenue is, as always, naive.