Commoditized! A New Era of Facebook Just Began
Facebook’s bleeding edge just sprung a geyser. And I think I heard a cheer on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
If you love watching boring economic theory colorfully manifest in the real world, I’ve got a good historical moment for you: Facebook just made the final tweak to their algo to officially transition content inputs into a commodity. Hello, Feed Quality Program!
Wait. What’s a Commodity?
A commodity is a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other commodities of the same type. Commodities are most often used as inputs in the production of other goods or services.
The key point here is the underlying product has a standard quality that makes it interchangeable with other very similar products.
Classic examples are cotton, oil, and gold. A new example is “shareable content.”
And, Like, How Does This Apply to Facebook Content Creators?
Facebook’s algo update diversifies the amount of publishers we see in our feeds because users complained they don’t like seeing several BuzzFeed or HuffPo articles in the same session.
Basically, our brain requires novelty to maximize dopamine dosing, and Facebook wants our brains to firehose dopamine into our souls so we never want to leave or, if we do, we jones like a junkie to return the very next moment our brain isn’t distracted with basic needs at the foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. (See How Facebook and Candy Crush Got You Hooked and Nir Eyal’s excellent work on the causes of Tech Addition.)
As a result, at the “dopamine trigger” level, Facebook has set a standard for how they define “quality content” as a floor to accept or reject content inputs from publishers, and they now have a large enough set of “quality content” publishers where Facebook can think of them all interchangeably like this:
So, publishers might think of content coming from a source like BuzzFeed, HuffPo, UpWorthy, Cheat Sheet (shameless plug), Vox, Bustle, etc.
But Facebook (and, I’d argue, most Facebook users) think of content coming from Facebook (the branded distribution platform) at best and “who cares” at worst.
Got It. Does This Mean the Toothpaste Wars are Coming?
Publishers can call P&G to learn the playbook for differentiating commodities, but I believe the supply of content is so astronomical in the Information Age that publishers are pipe-dreaming if they think Facebook’s core demo is leaving a college classroom, pulling out their phones and giving a moment’s cred to the sea of logos accompanying what they perceive as random content appearing in a stream. (Banner Ad Blindness for Logos, anyone?)
Moreover, as a long-time partner with Yahoo, I know very well how often distribution platform users incorrectly believe syndicated content is actually content created by the distributor — even when a headline link takes them to a new site!
Crazy, right? Well, not too crazy when we think of how many people believed and still believe paying AOL is how to get onto the Internet ;)
At this point in the story, if you are on Wall Street, call the CME and ask when they can start writing contracts on your favorite new commodity “shareable content.”
If you are a savvy media professional, check out the two milestone learnings I’ve extracted from this event so you continue to become a master of your career.
Lastly, Click here to follow me on Medium or Twitter to discover more media industry insights in my next post for savvy media professionals.
