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…

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