Time Borrowed
“In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site,” reports the New York Times. The writers add: “The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal.”
Posting journalism directly to Facebook will be great for those publishers who do it early. They will enjoy a set of small privileges that will express themselves in major ways: their stories will load faster than links to outside sites; their posts will merge more seamlessly into the addictive News Feed. Engagement, views, sharing, time spent — pick whatever metric makes you feel the best! — will increase.
A Facebook that treats native posts without favor will still inherently favor them because they are closer in form to the things that Facebook users share the most — and any link that would be widely shared on Facebook would be more widely shared if it weren’t a link to a website. Publishers early to accept Facebook’s proposition will enjoy an additional, larger advantage: For a short and glorious time, they alone will reap enormous the benefits of this heightened context. Their presence in News Feed will seem slightly easier and more natural than the presence of their competitors, whose manipulative headlines — which have been carefully optimized to convince you to leave Facebook to go to another site — will read an awful lot like spam. By serving as shining examples to those on the outside, they will create additional pressure to come in, given the opportunity. Publishers who join later will enjoy a perpetually diminishing advantage, gaining access to an audience pursued by ever more publishers instead of a few. Eventually, publications that once competed with each other for Facebook’s audience from the outside will find themselves doing the same from the inside, using Facebook’s platform not just to reach their audiences but to turn those audiences into revenue.
How exactly this will go remains to be seen. But Facebook has been pushing native video for months. It has been wildly successful — the raw numbers achieved by Facebook videos are enormous. My feed is now filled with auto-playing Facebook videos. Many of them are from sources I’ve never heard of; an increasing number, however, come from professional publishers. Meanwhile, YouTube videos appear in my feed like this:
They expand and play within the News Feed with a single click — a behavior that gave them an advantage until a few months ago. But Facebook videos play on their own, and, at least at the moment, contain no advertising. Whether or not Facebook removes YouTube embeds — and why wouldn’t they? — might not even matter. Facebook users will do it for them.
That the New York Times and BuzzFeed are said to be participating in this program speaks to its appeal. BuzzFeed is growing fast and charges a lot of money for sponsored content; the Times has a paid subscriber base and a favorable relationship with advertisers, at least compared to much of the online publishing world, which is facing harrowing declines in advertising rates. BuzzFeed and the Times are making their decisions from positions of relative comfort and security. If Facebook publishing is attractive to healthy companies, imagine how appealing it will be to dying ones.
Publishers will act based on a preemptive fear of being left behind. It’s a reasonable fear! But it’s also a consuming, existential one. It’s powerful enough to overcome worries that Facebook, an internet platform and publicly traded company with an overriding interest in its own growth and survival and a history of profound and rapid change, may not share a common set of goals. It’s powerful enough to counter protests that of course platforms develop ideologies of their own. It’s powerful enough to rehabilitate the memory of the Facebook app economy and Zynga and OMGPop and to drown out conversations about King, maker of Candy Crush and one of the most shorted stocks on the market. It’s powerful enough to challenge the much longer history of software and web platforms, which in the last two decades have rarely deviated from the classic theology: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Years of free referral traffic from Facebook have posed the question: When will Facebook want to keep this traffic for itself? Supposing years of future success — and putting out of mind that another law of platforms is eventual death — partner journalism poses its own version of this question: If Facebook knows what works, why outsource it?
The publishing industry is gloomy and threatened and increasingly claustrophobic. Most publishers, even the ones who claim otherwise, are not tech companies in any meaningful way (though one might ask, “How would you describe a company that designs, produces, and distributes branded content for advertisers for enormous fees?”), so any access to the world of tech is an intoxicating prospect. It’s a cynical oversimplification to say that news organizations and apps exist for the same reason — to gather human attention — but their revenue models suggest that this is at least their shared business model. Facebook — that is, News Feed — is succeeding on a different scale than any publication can dream of. That it is willing to share some of this time and attention is understandably very exciting.
So Facebook offers to let publishers into News Feed. It offers, probably, a great CMS — better than most publishing companies could come up with on their own. It offers a revenue sharing plan that offers at least partial participation in Facebook’s sector of the attention business. It offers ways to target stories like never before. And so the publishers feel like they’ve made it. That they have crossed over, at least a little, from a dying industry to a booming one.
Native publishing will be good — maybe great! — for Facebook’s News Feed, which is by far its most lucrative product. If it works, it will increase the amount of time Facebook users spend scrolling and engaging and reading — and it will create new opportunities to turn human boredom into cash. It will make Facebook feel like a better place, one that doesn’t just link you to interesting things but that is home to them. The Times, in its reported writeup of these deals, promotes the idea that the relationship will be mutually beneficial:
To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.
Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.
What’s harder to see from this perspective is that News Feed is Facebook’s present, financially speaking — the vast majority of its revenues, some $3.59 billion, came from advertising (69 percent of which came from mobile advertising), and the product most responsible for this revenue by a wide margin is News Feed — and also the closest thing Facebook has to a legacy product. It was introduced in 2006. It’s a feed. It is the largest of the last generation of internet platforms, and of the social feeds; its lucky compatibility with the smartphones that took over its world — the iPhone didn’t exist when it was first announced — ensured a prolonged period of dominance. Facebook is giving publishers the keys to its oldest product — the product it is spending billions of dollars to attempt to replace. Facebook, rightfully anxious about the speed at which its industry changes — especially having been the beneficiary of such a change itself — is staking its future on Instagram and WhatsApp and virtual reality helmets and literally becoming the internet in the developing world and god knows what else. Facebook’s developer conference, which starts tomorrow, should be instructive. According to TechCrunch:
Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends.
At first, Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content and information to flow through Messenger. Depending on the success of the early experiments, Facebook may then mull bringing more utilities to Messenger.
Facebook has been trying to find the next Facebook for years now. In 2013, before it purchased WhatsApp and fitness tracking company Moves, it purchased a company called Onavo. Onavo, which offered a free app that reduces data usage, was ostensibly valuable to Facebook’s international Internet.org project. But it had also built an enormously valuable app analytics service. With a rare and nearly complete view of its users’ internet activity, Onavo was able to see which apps were succeeding before anyone else but Apple and Google — it was, I was told in early 2014, the only outside firm that knew exactly how big Snapchat was. This analytics service — once widely used by venture capitalists and tech companies — was shut down shortly after purchase.
There is a helpful symmetry here, if you’ll grant it. Online publishers, with more readers than ever, are looking desperately for the next thing; Facebook, with more people using its core product than ever, is doing the same. The difference, of course, is that publishers’ next thing already belongs to someone else. Their future belongs to Facebook’s past.
The Content Wars is an occasional column intended to keep a majority of Content coverage in one easily avoidable place.
