From The Awl:
Journalist running faster to stay even goes backward
“In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site,” reports the New York Times. The writers add: “The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal.”
Posting journalism directly to Facebook will be great for those publishers who do it early. They will enjoy a set of small privileges that will express themselves in major ways: their stories will load faster than links to outside sites; their posts will merge more seamlessly into the addictive News Feed. Engagement, views, sharing, time spent—pick whatever metric makes you feel the best!—will increase.
A Facebook that treats native posts without favor will still inherently favor them because they are closer in form to the things that Facebook users share the most—and any link that would be widely shared on Facebook would be more widely shared if it weren’t a link to a website. Publishers early to accept Facebook’s proposition will enjoy an additional, larger advantage: For a short and glorious time, they alone will reap enormous the benefits of this heightened context. Their presence in News Feed will seem slightly easier and more natural than the presence of their competitors, whose manipulative headlines—which have been carefully optimized to convince you to leave Facebook to go to another site—will read an awful lot like spam. By serving as shining examples to those on the outside, they will create additional pressure to come in, given the opportunity. Publishers who join later will enjoy a perpetually diminishing advantage, gaining access to an audience pursued by ever more publishers instead of a few. Eventually, publications that once competed with each other for Facebook’s audience from the outside will find themselves doing the same from the inside, using Facebook’s platform not just to reach their audiences but to turn those audiences into revenue.
How exactly this will go remains to be seen. But Facebook has been pushing native video for months. It has been wildly successful—the raw numbers achieved by Facebook videos are enormous....MORE
