Less news content comes through your Facebook feed than you might think
Shan Wang over at Nieman Lab performed a neat experiment. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, she got 400 Facebook users to send her screenshots of their top 10 Facebook posts they see when they would first open their app. She then went through each screenshot and scored how many of the posts linked to news content (which she defined rather broadly) and how many were non-news content (think text-only status updates and baby photos).
What she found was that news content is virtually non-existent in the top of the Newsfeed:
Half the people in our survey saw no news at all in the first 10 posts — even using an extremely generous definition of “news” (from celebrity gossip to sports scores to history-based explainers, across all mediums; our count included any news shared by the publishers themselves, other pages, or individuals, and sponsored publisher content).
Another 23 percent saw only one piece of news content. Sixteen percent saw two. Exactly one person out of 402 had news stories make up the majority of their feed (eight news items).
This dovetails nicely with an experiment I performed a few weeks ago that found that posts from Facebook pages were virtually non-existent in my Newsfeed and were crowded out from friends and Facebook Group posts.
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I think it’s worth saying that Facebook is under no obligation to give more weight to a post linking to a New York Times article than it does for a baby photo, anymore than your Candy Crush game should feel obligated to link to New York Times articles. And that lack of obligation should be always top of mind as news organizations allocate resources to it.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.
