Category Archives: News

Quick thoughts: Defragmenting media on Facebook

Facebook seems to be working on two fronts to bring content from third party sites natively into the Facebook experience. This began with video, where Facebook has been quietly bringing both major traditional brands and smaller content creators into the core Facebook experience. But there are now reports that Facebook plans to do the same with news articles from major publications like the New York Times, Buzzfeed, and National Geographic.

I’ve talked previously about the video efforts, and in that piece I said this:

Facebook has become a massive destination for video, but almost all the video is actually hosted on other platforms. That obviously has cost advantages for Facebook, but it means that it doesn’t own the content, and therefore can’t monetize it effectively. It also means that engagement around videos on Facebook is fragmented, with popular YouTube videos attracting millions of comments scattered across hundreds of thousands of different user shares of the same video.

There are lots of aspects to all this, and Facebook is no doubt talking up the performance and monetization benefits of publications hosting their content directly on Facebook. But I think one of the other key benefits is the ability to overcome this fragmentation, and that applies just as much to news as it does to video. So let me expand on that a bit. The problem as things work today is that there’s no single version of either a video or an article on Facebook, just the original on the third party site. Meanwhile, there could be thousands of individual shares of that video or article on Facebook, with no connection between them. On the third party site there might be an indication of the number of third party shares, but the site has no easy way to digest what’s happening on each of those shares, and Facebook users have no visibility into how many shares, comments or other metrics the article or video is capturing in total across Facebook. Sometimes Facebook takes an article shared my multiple friends and bundles it into a single card with a single link, but there are still two entirely separate discussions happening among two separate groups of friends.

What Facebook could do if these things were being shared natively through Facebook is start to aggregate all this activity much more effectively, both for the content owners and for users, with commenting, stats tracking and so on happening much more effectively. And of course Facebook could share much more data about the users sharing the content with the content owners, so that they’d get a much better picture of who’s viewing the content. One of the key challenges with Facebook (in contrast to Twitter) is that sharing is inherently private, which provides almost zero visibility for content owners. With native sharing on Facebook, that could change, though of course it raises some interesting privacy implications. If you’re commenting on my video or article on Facebook, does that mean I now get to see your comments, even if they’re only shared with your friends and not public?  And in a world where many news sites have either switched off comments or left them on but failed to curate them effectively, could Facebook help to provide a better class of discussion?

There are so many aspects to all this, including some significant risks for the brands involved. But it seems to me that they would at least in part be making the following tradeoff: ceding control over hosting and branding the content itself in favor of better visibility and tracking of the engagement with that content. For some of them, at least, I’m guessing that’s a tradeoff worth making.