Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: This article goes a little easy on Facebook

[quote name="Fullofkittens"]What this leaves out is what journalists have been saying about Facebook: the reason publishers "pivoted to video" in 2016-2017 was that Facebook told them that videos got more engagement than articles by some astounding amount. <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html">That was dishonest of them:</a> in reality they wanted publishers to make content that didn't take people to another site, and anyone that uses Facebook could have told them this. I think the Slate article is on the money(!) in that a fundamental problem with the web is that money == eyeballs and that leads to distorted incentives for news outlets. Personally, I think NPR is a bit ahead of the curve on this point: over the years they've figured out how to say "hey, we make the stuff you want, you've got to pay us or we will go out of business" in such a way that people actually do pay them. It's actually easier for me to imagine Amazon Prime or Netflix coming up with a journalistic arm than it is for me to imagine an existing news outlet forming a productive business relationship with Facebook, because Facebook's entire business model relies on people not paying for things and never leaving Facebook. (Also this leaves out of the conversation the fact that Gen Z doesn't want Facebook and even millennials are starting to abandon the platform, it's the landline of social media platforms.)[/quote]