Facebook is in talks with several media firms, including Vice, The Onion, and Vox Media, to produce high quality short-form sponsored videos
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
What happens when platforms turn into publishers?
If you’re a publisher, Facebook holds a lot of power. The social media giant is already responsible for directing up to 40 percent of some sites’ traffic, and 75 percent of BuzzFeed’s. Now, according to a report in The New York Times on Tuesday, Facebook is negotiating with a number of publishers to be more than a funnel that directs users to content on news sites. Instead, the story says, the company will partner with media companies (the Times, National Geographic and BuzzFeed are rumored) to host entire stories and journalism internally, “a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems,” the Times writes.
This news shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook executives hinted in recent months that they intend to capitalize on their 890 million daily users by incentivizing publishers and brands to create content exclusively for the site. After creating a video-hosting platform, for example, Facebook tweaked its algorithm to favor the video content that used the tool. In February, Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer, announced that Facebook intended to extend these services to all content. By hosting it, Cox argued, the platform could produce a better user experience than publishers—optimizing stories for mobile, for instance.
“Go where your audience is” is a basic tenet of journalism in the digital age—and one that has even storied paywalled news outlets, like The New Yorker and The New York Times, scurrying to create Snapchat accounts and interactive Facebook feeds to attract readers. But forgoing that click that takes readers away from a social site and back to their own creates a drastically different power divide. The content isn’t theirs anymore, at least in the traditional sense. The audience it draws, the user data it accumulates—all that belongs to Facebook...MORE
