Facebook and the Media Have an Increasingly Landlord-Tenant Style Relationship

Facebook and the Media Have an Increasingly Landlord-Tenant Style Relationship

Facebook met the world for less than a decade, but it alters the entire structure of the media sector. From previous “Media includes Facebook” to current “Facebook leads Media,” the shift is quite enormous as Facebook, nowadays, is the driving factor of the media performance.

According to the publishers, traffic from Facebook plummet by 40%, the traffic of giants like BuzzFeed also declined significantly around 30%, presenting a proportional relation to the performance of Facebook. To put in a simple way: A growing number of online publishers have come to rely on Facebook for a significant part of their traffic. That is, Facebook almost controls the media sector. The more reliant a media outlet is on the social network, the more its traffic from Facebook is affected.

I wonder what causes such a role change of Facebook from being a startup company in media to become a landlord of media. The unfortunate answer may be that even Facebook does not even know the true answer. However, it is possible to throw some thoughts out there. First, Facebook controls access to its 1.5 billion or so users, and it tweaks the algorithm that determines which updates appear in a particular user’s news feed. With millions even billions clicks everyday on Facebook, users select the advertisements or links based on their preferences, and the ones Facebook recommends to their top news almost certainly draw users attention.

Moreover, Facebook not only push notification and new feeds to users, but it also both directly and indirectly reconstructs users’ preference even lifestyles. For example, girls who are interested in fashion tend to purchase more brands that had been worn by celebrities or fashion bloggers, and the majority of photo shoots of the celebrities and bloggers are advertised by Facebook’s push notification and daily new feeds. Certainly, as Facebook becomes more influential in user’s preferences in life, more brands and companies want to cooperate with it. However, Facebook does filter and pose stricter requirements when deciding which posts to push. Facebook is essentially engaging in a large-scale bait and switch, by encouraging them to host all of their output on its platform, but then gradually turning off the traffic tap so that their reach declines. Therefore, the role of landlord becomes apparent.  Social network has to boost their reach and traffic again, and one of the most common ways is to pay more for promoted posts and other forms of advertising.