Publishing’s Reliance on Facebook

In my last blog, I talked about the smiling curve in the context of the publishing industry; of how the publishers are losing all value and how apps like Facebook are increasingly becoming the referral for most articles on the Net!

But even as publishers increasingly move to Facebook to promote their content on our News Feeds, we, the users of Facebook, have protested. Facebook has taken notice of this:
“People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content.”
In response, Facebook has promised changes soon:
“Beginning in January 2015, people will see less of this type of content in their News Feeds.”

This puts the publishers in a conundrum: they have increasingly become reliant on Facebook to draw crowds to their sites (remember that Trending News sidebar on Facebook?), and now Facebook might have decided that it has overdone things and decided to step back a bit. Where would that leave the publishers?

No wonder that publishers have a can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it relation with Facebook! But John Herrman points out that Facebook’s course of action makes perfect sense…for Facebook. Herrman says that Facebook is neither an “evil force colonizing publishing” nor is it a “lumbering dumb beast grabbing at everything around it”. Rather, they are just trying to find the perfect balance between how many ad kind of News Feed items they show their users to maximize revenue v/s how much becomes too annoying and drives their users away.

Publishers could reconcile to that; but it gets worse for them. Facebook, the company (not the site) is diversifying like crazy (think of Instagram, chat apps, virtual reality systems). Why? Because it’s leaders are smart: they know what works today may not work tomorrow. Things change at warp speed on the Net and in technology. And so:
“It’s leaders don’t know for sure what’s coming next, but they know they need to be a part of it.”
And diversifying into possible future trends is one way to hedge their bets.

All this, of course, makes things very dangerous for publishers. If they get too tightly coupled with Facebook, what happens tomorrow if/when Facebook (the company) moves into its other businesses because they become the money spinners?

The publishing industry hasn’t exactly adapted to the Net well or fast. And now it seems that just when they might have found their savior (Facebook, the site), they may need to start looking ahead to what to do if/when Facebook (the company) changes course? They need to get nimble, something they haven’t been all this while…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more