Pivot to plausible deniability?
Last week, media Twitter went briefly ballistic discussing the death of Mic, the digital news outlet catering to millennial sensibilities (the brand is expected to be revived as part of Bryan Goldberg’s growing patchwork media empire sometime before the 2020 election). While it’s clear that a number of competing factors contributed to the site’s demise, including a contracting ad market and a generally difficult climate for pure-play digital media companies, most pundits took their lead from company’s founders, echoing their position Mic is yet another victim of Facebook. It’s a common refrain from media founders, and from a media press that has occasionally seen its own livelihood imperiled by Facebook’s dominant position, but it’s also a crutch.
It’s not a difficult case to make. Facebook is a tremendously powerful platform, just ask the Russian intelligence service. Facebook is possibly the largest audience platform in human history, and when it turned on the traffic firehose for digital publishers a few years ago media companies quickly came to rely on it to drive an audience to their content and eyeballs to the advertising that pays their bills. It’s a troubling dependency, of course, one that became even more apparent last year when Facebook turned the spigot off again with an algorithm change that dramatically reduced publisher reach in favor of posts from friends and family. Since that time Facebook has shouldered the blame for everything from the death of viral publisher Little Things, to the failure of digital giants like Buzzfeed and Vice to hit revenue targets. It’s been a tough few years in media town, and to hear any media executive tell it, there’s no culprit other than Facebook.
It’s an interesting position given how many times those self-same executives have taken to industry panels, podcasts, or interviews to sermonize about the perils of “building a house in someone else’s backyard.” It’s good advice, but behind the panel discussion pablum, most of them were busy building extravagant additions onto their own media McMansion in the middle of Facebook’s lawn. Which brings us back to Mic, the latest brand to be eulogized by employees, competitors, and pundits as a victim of the Facebook-backed “pivot to video.”
It’s true that Mic made pivoted, and pivoted hard. Just over a year ago the company dumped most of its editorial staff to focus on the production of video content, including original series for Facebook’s perpetually beleaguered Watch platform. (To be fair MTV News, Vocativ and Fox Sports and a host of others all made similar ill-fated bets around this time). But this is just the most recent in a string of similarly dubious decisions. Lest you forget in a wave of Facebook-inspired amnesia, the company has also been noted for spending roughly half its total value on vanity office space and for raising $60 million in venture funding with no coherent path to longterm profitability. All of these moves contributed the outlet’s ultimate failure, the layoff of nearly 100 employees, and it’s ultimate fire sale exit into the arms of Goldberg’s Bustle Digital Group.
By the time Mic made it’s fatal pivot to video (by inking a deal for Facebook Watch shows that would later be unceremoniously canceled) the phrase “pivot to video” had already become a media industry punchline. Do a quick Twitter search for the phrase and count the recent results that aren’t either sarcastic or scornful, you won’t need both hands. The deal was made in a world where Facebook had already broken publishers’ collective hearts once before, subsidizing and later abandoning live video content for Facebook Live.
Some have pointed to Facebook’s possibly inflated video metrics as cause de guerre, suggesting that the pivot to video was driven by false information. But bad metrics don’t tell the complete story. By late 2017 most publishers at least sensed the disconnect between Facebook’s video metrics and their own results in the medium. Many media executives privately express skepticism about the viability of forging ahead into a future driven by Facebook video views. But that didn’t mean that their sales teams weren’t happy to take advantage of the hype Facebook was building around video inventory extract dollars from advertisers and produce some short-term gains.
Of course, Facebook is complicit. Zuck and the gang in Menlo Park have displayed enough bad behavior this year alone to warrant being regulated within an inch of their corporate life. So why bother to distinguish between Facebook’s bad incentives and media’s bad decisions? It’s not a desire to vindicate Facebook, but letting the platform alone shoulder the blame for recent media failures risks missing the bigger picture. It’s far to easy for executives who over-promised and over-raised to wash their hands of the serious operational and strategy failures that have cost them their businesses and left hundreds of writers, reporters, producers, and support staffers out of their jobs.
Did Facebook mislead many media companies about the performance of video and it’s commitment to format? Probably. But Facebook doesn’t have the power to force anyone’s hand and by now it’s not even that good at hiding its own cards. We’ve seen plenty of evidence to suggest that Facebook will ruthlessly pivot its own strategy with no regard for who it leaves in the lurch. That goes double for the largely text-based, largely venture-backed, largely-overcapitalized digital brands that were the most likely to be swept up in the pivot to video narrative. Half the companies crying foul on Facebook employ reporters who have been covering the company’s endless course corrections for years. If digital media is going to make it through 2019, a year that’s poised to be even rougher than 2018, then reading its own headlines might be one place to start.
