Ten years of Facebook’s News Feed
MC&C media’s Mark Jackson asks if Facebook’s News Feed has been a harbinger of doom for traditional media or the gateway to new opportunities
As with so many digital entities that feel as though they’ve been part of our lives for ever, learning that Facebook’s News Feed is celebrating only its 10th anniversary comes as a bit of a shock.
Scrolling through the social network to grasp nuggets of news, both international and personal, has become as habitual a morning routine as the brushing of teeth or flicking through the morning paper.
But instead of complementing that morning routine, what if – as some have suggested – it is supplanting the incumbents? Is News Feed driving out traditional media, consigning print to an out-of-touch, out-of-date wasteland cherished only by dinosaurs? Former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, wasn’t mincing his words when he told a Financial Times event that “one day we will turn off our printing presses.”
In September 2006 Facebook moved from being a collection of profile pages that users could flit between to catch up on friends’ movements to a curated selection of top updates from both friends and media feeds. Instead of relying on the user to explicitly state what they were interested in, an algorithm would decide what best to serve up on the News Feed based on previous posts and activity.
There were protests. CNBC reports in a recent look back on News Feed’s inception that people actually turned up at Facebook headquarters to protest while one million joined a virtual protest group.
Today, social media users can’t imagine a world where their updates aren’t delivered in a feed of some sort. Everything from advertising to breaking news, celebrity features and friends’ baby news are being decided by computers. Curation used to be in the hands of editors, it’s now in the hands of algorithms [almost – Ed.]. And with everything you could possibly need in one place (or at least, what the algorithm says you could possibly need) why bother going anywhere else?
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We should bother going anywhere else simply because Facebook’s News Feed is far from the be all and end all of users’ information needs. Certainly, it’s a convenient way to get hold of some information and may well throw up nuggets users hadn’t previously considered, enhancing discovery. But there are a number of key limitations.
First of all, reach reduces as more content becomes available online. Quite simply, there’s too much competition to be seen in that magical top 12 posts or so. The News Feed algorithm decides how high to rank posts based on relevancy: who posted and when, if the type of content is in line with your interests and how many likes, shares and comments. With too much to look at there’s just not as much sharing going on.
It’s a great environment for niche publishers who have the chance to get some extra exposure but they’re fighting for the exact same audience share as the big boys. As a result it all becomes very fragmented, which isn’t particularly beneficial to anyone.
News Feed does try to counter this by making its algorithm prioritise quality over quantity when it comes to content but publishers have another problem to contend with. Friends. And Facebook says they come first. The social network knows that its users want to see what’s happening in their personal network before content and so the algorithm prioritises friends over media.
As a result, speaking to the Guardian, one publisher noted: “we look at distribution for the social platforms and they are doing really well, we look at the opportunities for creation and they are plentiful, the piece in the middle, where traditional publishers and broadcasters sit, that doesn’t look so great.”
While we all know that Facebook is going to continue to be a vital avenue for advertisers and publishers to spread the word and get access to new customers, in doing so, is it really announcing the death of print? That, to borrow from Mark Twain, is greatly exaggerated.
According to research by Newsworks, adding newspapers to a retail campaign increased effectiveness 2.8 times and boosted it for cars by 71%. It doubles TV effectiveness while boosting online display making it four times as effective. Compare this to a report from research firm Lumen which revealed that only 9% of digital ads are viewed for even as much as a second and only 35% had any views at all. Let alone demonstrated effectiveness or ROI.
So how do we counter this distorted view of advertising effectiveness? In one sense it’s up to advertisers and marketers to work against print’s image problem. This problem is in part due to the ever-decreasing tenure of your average CMO, which means they rarely see a project through to its conclusion, fostering campaign short-termism and a reliance on the immediacy of digital metrics – something we are actively trying to work against at MC&C.
Alternatively, it’s down to the publishers to sort out their own PR job – something the mysteriously named Project Juno is trying to do by bringing together major news brands to come together and properly demonstrate the opportunities for advertisers.
In short, News Feed’s anniversary and changes to the Facebook algorithm may grab the headlines but if we step back from the hype and take a longer term view of performance, we’ll see print and other channels like TV still doing a fantastic job of building brands and filling the sales funnel, ready for customers to be converted online.
Mark Jackson is managing director of MC&C media