Alarm bells began ringing over the weekend in newsrooms in six countries around the world. Something very strange was happening with the newsroom’s posts on Facebook. Rather than appearing in the newsfeeds of people you follow on social networks, the posts were appearing in a new separate section of the site called Explore Feed.
Facebook in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cambodia began to have different features that separated posts from people and posts from pages.
Saturday, Philip Stolhalykreporter for a newspaper based in Bratislava Dennick N.published caveat It went viral on Medium among social media managers and Facebook observers. “The organic reach of pages has decreased dramatically. Reach numbers for several Facebook pages questioned were down by two-thirds on Thursday and Friday compared to the previous day,” he wrote. “Interactions (likes, comments, shares) on 60 of Slovakia’s largest media pages have decreased by a quarter since the test. Guatemala and Cambodia also seem to be affected. same”
Since then, several headlines have focused on different parts of the test. pay Appears in your main newsfeed. mashable called it “”nightmare‘ Paid scenario.
Needless to say, publishers were concerned. Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, responded to Stolhalyk’s story on Twitter. “This image reflects experiments in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia,” Mosseri wrote. “It’s not global, and there are no plans for it to be.”
When Stolhalyk asked how long the test would take, “days, weeks, months,” Mosseri replied: “Days, weeks, months.” During. ”
Publishers outside these six countries may breathe a sigh of relief. The impact of this type of traffic decline will be devastating, especially in the fourth quarter, when many (American) publishers are selling a higher percentage of their “inventory.”
But to those inside those countries, the newsrooms were, to put it mildly, insane.
Marko Miletić works on the Serbian site Masina, saw a 58% drop in users visiting its Facebook page and a 72% drop in interactions last week when the test began rolling out. “We don’t know how long this test will last, but it could have implications for informational and political pluralism (at least to the extent that it existed on social networks),” he wrote to me. That’s because, he says, small media publishers and “grassroots political efforts” only have Facebook’s organic tools. By “boosting” posts he can’t afford the cost of distributing them on Facebook.
“Small (usually politically alternative) media outlets, citizen initiatives, activist campaigns, solidarity movements, etc. that do not have sufficient funds to sponsor posts reach people through Facebook, which is their primary tool of dissemination. “It will be difficult,” Miletic said.
Other publishers are taking a more optimistic view of the change, or at least refraining from making any immediate judgments.
“It’s too early to say anything definitive about the impact this is having on our traffic and reach,” says web editor Jenny Reid. Phnom Penh Post, he told me. “For some people here in Cambodia, it seems that the two feeds have not yet been completely separated, but the situation does not seem positive at the moment.”
Mr. Reed was the social media editor. economist Before taking on his current role, he said it was difficult to imagine how Facebook’s changes would positively impact readership. “In its current form, I don’t see how Explore Feed can be anything other than bad news for publishers,” she says. “It seems like a strange move considering Facebook has been trying to build bridges with news organizations since the beginning of the year. Facebook Journalism Project”
Reid said these changes are important for Cambodia’s broader media ecosystem. “According to a study, Facebook overtook television as the number one news source for Cambodians last year. Post Khmer, his Facebook page in Khmer Phnom Penh Post Officeis the fourth most liked Facebook page in the country, and seven out of the 10 most popular Facebook pages here are news websites or newspapers,” she told me. “This is surprising compared to, for example, the United States, where news publishers are not even in the top 50 most popular pages among Facebook users.”
Reading between the lines, it is clear that Cambodia’s news infrastructure underwent fundamental changes overnight. And none of the editors or their acquaintances that I was able to contact heard about this change from his Facebook before it happened. They just walked into work one day and everything was different.
In the long run, it might be a good idea to separate page posts and user posts. There’s a serious problem with News Feed. Perhaps a split feed would be a better experience. But I can imagine Facebook would want to do some big tests to see how it goes before making any major changes.
From Facebook’s perspective, the company needs to make new versions of its software available for trial. Publishers are used to the tools, so you can’t ask them to keep the tools static. Destructive testing may also be necessary to create a better Facebook in the future. In fact, through this iterative process, Facebook has built a product that many people use on average for more than 50 minutes per day.
But Facebook simply didn’t do that end Control news distribution in countries around the world. They entered the market strategically, like any other company, as part of their competition with other Internet companies. Several That responsibility must accompany the intentional rerouting of the public sphere through Facebook’s servers and advertising network. right?
This is not about understanding the content of the test. voxmatt iglesias argued that the change might be a good thing. “The Facebook-induced traffic boom only reduces the value of page views,” he tweeted. He said the decline in page views should translate into higher ad prices for publishers over time, as total domestic ad spending remains roughly constant. Indeed, when Facebook started sending more Conversely, we found that simply increasing the supply of traffic to publishers lowers ad prices. The opposite could happen (although I can’t imagine any digital media sales team wanting less inventory to sell).
In any case, if you are a publisher in one of the six affected countries, it must be cold comfort.
Facebook is unusually proactive about this test. rear It’s started, which is good. Mosseri responded on Twitter: I followed up with a blog post That partially explained their rationale. “The purpose of this test is to understand whether people prefer to have separate locations for personal and public content,” he wrote.
But Facebook’s response was strangely blind to the shackles it has on an entire country’s worth of publishers.Mr. Mosseri’s response to the Slovaks journalist This was to assure him that there were no plans to conduct this test on a global scale.
Facebook executives like to argue that people don’t understand the company’s staggering size, but this experiment shows just how disconnected that size is from how other people see the world. ing.
Are all the people in the test area a small portion (say 1%) of Facebook’s user base who want to see more posts from their family and friends, or are there 6 sovereigns who have come to trust Facebook? Are they citizens of a country? Is it a critical part of your news distribution infrastructure?
It’s both. And in this case, news publishers are just tweeting desperately, ignoring the power of internet companies.
I asked the following question on Facebook: Were media outlets notified, briefed, or consulted before the changes were made? How were these countries chosen? What deliberations were made about the possible trade-offs between what you learned and the possible negative effects on the media business and information ecosystem in these places?
Facebook has not responded.