In a move sure to offend many website publishers, Facebook wants to host articles that users link to, and serve their own Facebook ads on those articles. The change, which would affect users viewing Facebook on mobile, means that website publishers lose not only the traffic to their own site, missing out on the potential for further page views, but also would lose displaying their own advertising on these stories. Instead, Facebook wants to display their own ads and offer a revenue share option to the website’s whose content Facebook is hosting.
According to the New York Times, Facebook is talking with publishers about such an option.
Facebook hopes it has a fix for all that. The company has been on something of a listening tour with publishers, discussing better ways to collaborate. The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.
That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.
It is unclear if there would be an option for publishers to opt out of this. And it raises several issues. First would be the fact Facebook would be republishing these articles on their own servers, presumably without permission, in a move they call convenience for Facebook users who would not have to wait for remote sites to load the content.
Secondly, publishers might be reluctant to prevent Facebook from doing this, as doing so could mean Facebook reduces the exposure their site gets on Facebook when others share it, via Facebook’s own news feed algorithm. After all, it would make sense that Facebook would push content on mobile users that would lead to an additional article view on Facebook’s own servers where they could display their own ads, rather than sending them to the publisher’s actual website.
With mobile rapidly gaining on having half of all webpage views, and with some sites – such as The New York Times – already seeing over 50% of their traffic coming from mobile – this could have a definite impact on a website’s page views and advertising revenue, as there is no assurance that ad revenue that Facebook would replace with their revenue share would be as valuable as what is currently already on a site. And the loss of page views in the website could drive the value of ad placements on their own sites.
Will this change become a reality? It is hard to say, but Facebook clearly feels they are powerful enough that they could do it.
Jennifer Slegg
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Nathan Grimm (@n8ngrimm) says
I read the original article. The idea is that publishers would ‘send’ the content to Facebook and ad revenue would be shared. That sounds like a clear opt in to me.
Terrell Johnson says
Wow. Depending on how it all shakes out — and what kind of backlash it sparks — this has the makings of a pretty seismic shift in the economics of online content.
In one way, it’s actually not all that different from the model that publishers have used with Google AdSense for years now — work hard on your content and SEO to improve your rankings, and earn from a revenue-sharing deal with Google’s ad network — but Google hasn’t been this aggressive in proposing to host the content that millions of site publishers put out.
But in another way, this takes that model to a completely new level. Facebook would be in a position to dictate headlines, photo choices, teaser paragraphs, and potentially the content of news stories to publishers, rather than simply a platform for distributing their content. Some have worried that Facebook already is too powerful in determining what the public sees vis-a-vis the news; they’d have much more power in that realm if this comes to pass.
However, even Facebook’s power in this would be limited if the News Feed loses its credibility. If users come to see it as a Big Brother that’s intentionally manipulating the news it serves to its users — which no doubt a number of people already believe today — it would stand to lose something that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to get back, and users could abandon it.
It could also spark a big push for publishers to build up their email subscriber lists, as those would come to be perhaps the only way publishers could truly own their relationships with their readers. In fact, you’re already starting to see that happen again, with online publications like Vox.com and Quartz building up big email subscriber lists.
As the old story about the Zen Master and the little boy goes, “we’ll see.”
David Curtis says
I wonder if there’s a way to block the mobile scraping using a similar .htaccess addition like the one to block semalt. Maybe create a mobile paragraph on a non blocked (or non mobile) area with an image that’s not blocked, and have the blurb redirect to the actual mobile page so FB users still get the basic story idea and image to click on as before, but FB has nothing to sink its fangs into. If there would be no link to the story (no clickable headline) there if they scrape even that little bit, then I wonder if an outbound link “…learn more” would work at the bottom.