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Publishers might have to start paying Facebook if they want anyone to see their stories
Facebook’s latest test should terrify publishers.
by
Kurt Wagner
Oct 23, 2017, 3:11pm EDT
Justin Sullivan / Getty
Facebook may make it harder for people to see publishers’ stories, unless those publishers pay to promote them.
As part of a new test in six countries, Facebook is taking content from publishers and businesses out of its main feed. Instead, those posts will exist in a separate, hard-to-find feed that Facebook recently launched for discovering new stuff, called the “Explore Feed.”
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The Explore Feed’s purpose is to show users posts from people or publishers they don’t follow, in the hope that they’ll find new stuff they wouldn’t otherwise see. In some countries, though, the social giant is also testing putting all publisher content in this secondary feed, even if you do follow those publishers.
Facebook says the point is to give people two feeds: One with stuff from their friends and family, and the other from businesses and publishers. Here’s the full statement from Facebook:
“With all of the possible stories in each person’s feed, we always work to connect people with the posts they find most meaningful. People have told us they want an easier way to see posts from friends and family, so we are testing two separate feeds, one as a dedicated space with posts from friends and family and another as a dedicated space for posts from Pages. To understand if people like these two different spaces, we will test a few things, such as how people engage with videos and other types of posts. These tests will start in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. We have no current plans to roll this out globally.”
Though Facebook claims it doesn’t plan to roll this out globally right now, the fact that Facebook is even testing it should be terrifying for publishers, almost all of whom rely heavily on Facebook’s News Feed for distribution. The new Explore Feed is not easy to find. It’s buried on the lefthand rail on Facebook’s web version, or in the “Explore” tab on the iOS app. In my case, it took three taps from the News Feed in order to find it.
Putting publisher content that far from the main feed would be a big deal. In Slovakia, for example, where this new test is under way, a journalist wrote on Medium over the weekend that organic reach for publishers fell by “two-thirds” after Facebook moved Page posts to the Explore Feed. The Medium post was titled, “Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen.”
Biggest drop in organic reach we’ve ever seen. Pages have 4 times less interactions, reach fell by two-thirds t.co/KhAtCR0yvu— Filip Struhárik (@filip_struharik)
October 21, 2017
And regardless of whether or not Facebook chooses to roll this out fully, it’s yet another reminder of how important Facebook has become for the media world, and for news distribution in particular. (Two-thirds of Americans claim to get some news from social media.) Facebook has a long history of changing the rules on a whim, leaving publishers scrambling to keep up.
It’s possible Facebook will see the same data publishers are seeing in Slovakia and decide hiding publisher Pages isn’t a good idea after all. It’s also possible the opposite could happen. Most Facebook changes start as tests before they are turned on for good, like when the company started testing autoplay videos with the sound on last August. It rolled it out to everyone in February.
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