The social media networking site Facebook recently
it uses to determine what its users see highlighted on their “news
feeds,” the center c
olumn of shared links, pictures and posts that
determines most of what a user sees at the site.
There is a decent
chance that this change will in large part determine what you read on
the Internet in 2014. Maybe not “you,” the regular Salon reader or
relative of the author, but “you” the person who clicked on this story
because someone you know shared it on Facebook or Twitter. The purpose
of the Facebook change was to
— that is, to make sure you are more likely to see it when
“high-quality” news content is shared, because Facebook’s news feed
algorithms do as much hiding as highlighting — and the result seems to
have been an immediate decline in the traffic of all the sites that
spent 2013 mastering the art of blowing up on Facebook. (Well, all of
them but one, but we’ll get to that.)
There is an entire ecosystem of these sites — one industry publication uses the term
which works as well as anything else — and if you use Facebook
regularly you probably clicked on a link from one of them at some point
in 2013. Elite Daily, Distractify, ViralNova and the grandaddy of them
all, Upworthy, the site that essentially invented and perfected the form
in the space of a year. Upworthy’s headlines may be mockable (I Thought
I Knew How to Goad Readers Into Clicking on Something Stupid, but What I
Learned Next Changed Everything), but they
Among
the few sites with more Facebook “likes” than Upworthy are the
Huffington Post (at this point practically old media, by Web standards)
and BuzzFeed, the site that made fogies mourn for the future of news
before newer, shockingly dumber sites showed up to make BuzzFeed look
respectable and sophisticated by comparison.
BuzzFeed
and these viral publishers depend, for their very existence, on
Facebook. They talk about “social media” and “sharing” generally, but
specifically it is as much about gaming Facebook as SEO was about gaming
Google.
SEO is “search engine optimization,” a now-passé form of
traffic goosing, involving a lot of unsexy coding tricks and liberal use
of keywords and link spam to win high placement in Google results.
These tricks once made various hucksters rich and helped establish the
Huffington Post as one of the biggest sites on the Internet. SEO is
being supplanted by a new series of tricks designed to manipulate social
media. The “social sites” can claim, with some justification, to be
packaging content that real people wanted to share, instead of gaming
some algorithms. But just because the new techniques involve a dab of
psychological manipulation doesn’t mean the formula for success isn’t
just as rote: an arresting image or video still, and a headline that
either stokes curiosity without satisfying it, or that promises some
fresh, invigorating outrage.
If the stuff below the headline
doesn’t live up to it, no matter. One of the open secrets of the
Internet is that no one reads anything on the Internet. People do go
around clicking on all sorts of things, but
the majority of people who clicked on this piece stopped reading it a few paragraphs ago.
One
slightly terrifying fact (for an employee of an online media
organization) about the rise of the viral publishers last year was how
each new one was less labor-intensive than the last. Each step on the
path from BuzzFeed to Upworthy to ViralNova involved fewer paid humans
putting less thought into each iteration of the viral-manipulation
industry. Say what you will about BuzzFeed (and I have), but at least
they
make things. A lot of people work there, creating original
stories and videos and other pieces of information and entertainment
and journalism known collectively and depressingly as “content.”
Upworthy makes headlines —
literally dozens of them for each tiny “story”
— and then embeds or links to images and videos created by others. They
repackage existing content. Obviously, so does BuzzFeed. And so do
Salon, and Slate, and the Entire Internet. But Upworthy realized that
all it had to do was repackage existing content, and not bother to create any of its own. And then
Upworthy spent 2013 kicking everyone’s else’s ass.
ViralNova
seemed the logical, terrible endpoint of the entire thing. It is
powered purely by cynicism and contempt. The whole site
is (was?) literally one guy
who realized he could pretty much do exactly what Upworthy was doing,
except by himself and without any earnest illusions about making the
world a better place. The founder of ViralNova discovered that it didn’t
even matter if the content was recently created, or from a reliable
source, or true, or even plausible. All that mattered was a headline and
an image, and the shares would follow. In December 2013, the site had
66 million unique visitors. (That, for the record, is a lot.) The site’s
creator
hopes to unload it for seven figures, in part because he recognizes that Facebook could cripple its traffic in an instant if it decided to.
Facebook seems to have decided to. Facebook
may have slayed this entire little industry with one blow:
Between
November 2013 and January 2014, a long list of so-called “social
publishers” saw their traffic dip substantially, according to comScore.
Traffic to Upworthy dropped 51 percent. Traffic to Elite Daily dropped
47 percent. Traffic to Vice dropped 22 percent, to BroBible by 17
percent, to Huffington Post by 16 percent. Between December and January
traffic to Distractify and Thought Catalog dropped 30 percent and 7
percent, respectively.
What’s more, traffic to all of those sites
was on a broad upward trajectory prior to the January lull. Elite
Daily, for example, saw its number of unique users balloon from around
2.3 million in September, to nearly 9 million in December, and
attributed the growth to Facebook. Upworthy also enjoyed healthy growth
over that period, climbing from 6 million uniques in August to 14
million in November.
A couple of engineers make a
couple of tweaks and suddenly what was once the most sharable content on
the Web is a lot less shared. It’s easy to read into this a slightly
ominous message: This is Facebook’s Internet, and the media is just
attempting to find a way to sustain itself in it.
* * *
New York Times social media staff editor Michael Roston
had some very useful advice:
“Don’t depend on an outside social network for your traffic.” That
seems like an obvious lesson, except that everyone forgot to come up
with a better idea.
It had been decided by all the gurus that the
social media sites were the new home pages,
and the future of news distribution. And Facebook is, at the moment,
the only truly important social media site. (Journalists all prefer
Twitter, because it’s more conducive to the sharing of news, but
Facebook crushes Twitter in terms of audience size and reach.)
You
may have heard that the American newspaper industry collapsed. This was
mostly because the Internet ruined its once-lucrative business of
charging people a bit of money to run classified ads, and then being the
only available source for people who wanted or needed to look at
classified ads. Unfortunately, this model is what had been paying for
all the journalism (and much of the arts criticism, and comics-drawing,
and crossword puzzle-creating) in the country for a century or so. It
was replaced by … online advertising, mostly, which is much cheaper to
buy than print advertising, in large part because online it is much
easier to measure how little people want to look at or click on an ad.
So
now no one knows how to fund all the journalism! Unless you want to go
the truly old-fashioned way of relying on the generosity of vain rich
people (and the generosity of vain rich people has funded a great deal
of wonderful journalism over the centuries), you need, these days, a
large, and preferably growing, number of “unique” visitors to afford a
large staff of news-gathering humans. You probably need Facebook to get
these uniques. Facebook is now explicitly declaring its intention to
decide whether you deserve them.
If Facebook wants to make sure
only to highlight high-quality news, then Facebook’s standards of
quality suddenly start to matter quite a lot. As I said earlier, one of
those viral publishers has, so far, not seen any traffic fallout from
Facebook’s decision. That would be BuzzFeed, whose
traffic has only increased since Facebook announced its news feed changes.
Business Insider’s Nicholas Carson suggested that this may have
something to do with BuzzFeed’s practice of, quite literally, buying
traffic from Facebook. He then
updated his post to put that suggestion a bit more delicately,
and alongside the counterpoint that maybe BuzzFeed is just more
successful because it’s so good at making great content. (And here is my
regular disclosure that I like and admire many of the people working at
BuzzFeed, which does publish some very good reporting and smart
commentary.)
Is BuzzFeed’s secret payola? Or does Facebook’s
algorithm simply like its content more because of its innate quality? I
don’t think there’s anything resembling outright bribery going on. I
imagine, though, that Facebook’s standard of “high quality” will, for
the foreseeable future, reward large, traditional news organizations,
and, most likely, some of Facebook’s most trusted “partners.”
Facebook is currently getting
fairly rapturous reviews
for its new Paper app, which makes a user’s news feed, along with
other, curated news feeds, elegant-looking and easy to read. The feeds
are curated in part by actual human editorial employees, and
this list of outlets Facebook worked with gives some indication of what Facebook is looking for in terms of “high-quality” content.
Facebook
has worked closely with about 40 content producers, ranging from big
news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The
Associated Press to magazines like National Geographic and Time, to
improve the look of their articles on the app. When readers click on an
item to read it, they are taken to the website of the original
publisher, which can serve ads or promote other content to them.
What
a very old-fashioned list. So: Don’t rely on Facebook, but if you need
to, it helps to be someone Facebook has heard of, from print.
* * *
On
the Internet, complaints about the click-bait garbage published by,
well, basically everyone are usually made with the understanding that
the click-bait garbage is necessary to juice numbers, even if the
publication’s “brand” is built on smarter stuff. And this is nothing
new: In the old days, when classified advertising funded the newspapers,
popular sections like the sports page and
the Yellow Kid
to some degree “subsidized” the city hall reporting. The city hall
reporting still happened, partly because the publisher felt some sort of
civic obligation to produce quality journalism but also because the
publisher was making a fortune anyway. But what happens when no one’s
making a fortune? Because
another open secret on the Internet is that no one is making much money at all. (Besides, obviously, Google.)
BuzzFeed has come up with a creative response. The solution is to create content for brands — or, “advertisements” — and then
pay Facebook, which is an advertising platform, to promote the content you create for brands. Soon,
you are an advertising agency.
Or maybe you already are!
“[BuzzFeed's]
brand partners are actually beginning to use its media-buying team as
an agency of sorts, asking it to package posts on BuzzFeed with a paid
distribution element, too.”)
But once you are an ad
agency, it seems only a matter of time before you begin to ask yourself
why you are paying all these people to make all this other stuff that no
one paid for.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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