Company / division: Facebook
Facebook (FB) hires MTV executive Mina Lefevre to help it develop TV shows — Quartz (Feb 9, 2017)
Facebook has to this point been focused entirely on making it easy to share and enjoy content created by others, whether that’s its nearly 2 billion users, news organizations, TV stations, or others. To the extent that Facebook has tried to begin hosting some content, that content has still been created by other entities, even if it now lives on Facebook in either its native video platform or Facebook Instant Articles. However, it looks like that might start changing soon, with this hire from MTV. Lefevre doesn’t specify in her Facebook post what exactly she’s going to be working on, but does say she’s going to help build “Facebook’s original content”, and given her past expertise in TV, it seems reasonable to assume video will be a focus. There’s obviously a broader trend of platforms owning more of their own content, from HBO to Netflix and Amazon to Apple and so on, but this is new for Facebook. I’m very curious what the focus will be here – there are so many possible directions Facebook could go in with original video, though scripted dramas a la Netflix seem like a poor fit.
via Quartz (Lefevre’s FB post here)
Facebook Lite hits 200M users as low-bandwidth world revenue skyrockets – TechCrunch (Feb 8, 2017)
On Facebook’s earnings call recently, it was asked what drove recent stellar growth in Asia (133 million new MAUs year on year, and 28 million DAUs quarter on quarter), and answered that there were three drivers: Internet.org, Android improvements including Facebook Lite, and third party promotional free data plans in places like India, which was the strongest single growth market. Internet.org actually only accounts for a small amount of growth – the last update the company provided was 40 million total users back in November 2016, so although it’s a high profile project for the company it’s not that significant. But today Facebook announced that Facebook Lite has 200 million users, which is over 10% of its total MAUs, and over a quarter of its combined Asia and Rest of World users, which is the vast majority of the target base. So this is the real success story here, and it’s just about making the app more bandwidth efficient for emerging markets, not about zero rating. Now, obviously those 200 million aren’t all incremental new users for Facebook – some will have switched from using the regular app – but this is a big growth driver for Facebook. Also worth noting is that all those three growth drivers are about either bandwidth efficiency or paying less (or nothing) for the same bandwidth – this is the single biggest factor in Facebook’s growth in emerging markets.
via TechCrunch
Snap Beefs Up Copycat Defense Amid Concerns Over Facebook Mimics – Bloomberg (Feb 8, 2017)
This is another one of those times where it feels like the Facebook copying Snapchat narrative might have been a little over-applied. It seems as though Snap has hired and/or acquired an engineer and his firm in Switzerland, whose expertise is making it harder for outsiders to reverse engineer code. The Facebook read here implies that Facebook is actually reverse engineering the code rather than simply building equivalent features from scratch. To the extent that this is about preventing copying, it’s far likelier to be a response to smaller outfits cloning Snapchat than Facebook, which has many engineers more than capable of building these features without reverse engineering code.
via Bloomberg
Facebook closing 200 Oculus VR Best Buy pop-ups due to poor store performance – Business Insider (Feb 8, 2017)
One of the biggest challenges VR faces at this point is suggestions that it’s somehow failing to take off despite a big push into the mainstream, and that’s a narrative Business Insider has pushed before. This is where narratives are dangerous – the fact here is that VR is that VR is still in its infancy as a mainstream technology – other than the mobile flavors, it’s expensive, requires other expensive hardware, and there’s not a ton of content there beyond gaming. But if the narrative instead becomes that it’s fizzling as it attempts to break into the mainstream, that is a lot more damaging than merely talking about a technology that has small but growing adoption. VR can, however, already be fairly compelling as a demo, which is why it’s a blow that Facebook is closing these Oculus demo stations, because VR is really impossible to grok without trying it in person. But those trying to sell VR have to be very careful not to oversell it to mainstream users – it still has quite a long way to go before it crosses the chasm, and making it seem bigger than it is feeds this dangerous narrative.
via Business Insider
NetEase Offers Google a Way Back to China — The Information (Feb 6, 2017)
Though the NetEase tie-up is the main “new news” here, the broader story is that there are still important barriers to Google getting back into China (just as there are for Facebook), the thorniest of which is whether Google sacrifices its stance on censorship in order to re-enter the market. That was the primary reason it left back in 2010, and yet the Chinese government’s approach hasn’t really changed in the interim. Unlike Facebook, which is prevented by the government from operating in China at all, Google chose to leave China of its own volition, and the main barrier to re-entry would be deciding to go back in despite the moral quandaries inherent in such a choice. This is where Apple’s history in China is interesting – as first and foremost a hardware company, it has been able to run the core part of its business just as it does elsewhere, with any censorship applying to narrow slices of its overall business, such as individual apps in the App Store or the iBooks store as a whole. For Google and Facebook, however, access to information is their central value proposition, and so sacrificing the completeness of that offering to censorship is a much bigger concession.
via The Information
Google and Facebook to help French newsrooms combat ‘fake news’ ahead of presidential election – VentureBeat (Feb 6, 2017)
If only these companies had made such a concerted effort to combat fake news in the US a year ago rather than only really springing into action in the very late stages of last year’s presidential campaign (and in Facebook’s case, mostly after it was over). It appears both companies are taking their duty to put accuracy above ad revenue a bit more seriously in France than they did in the US, a sign of increased realism about the power that each company has in shaping the news people see.
via VentureBeat
97 companies file opposition to Trump’s immigration order – TechCrunch (Feb 6, 2017)
Last week, Recode reported that several big tech companies were drafting a letter to the Trump administration on immigration, though I still can’t find confirmation that this letter has actually been sent. However, those tech companies and many others have now filed an official friend of the court brief in the lawsuit being brought against the administration by the states of Minnesota and Washington. This steps things up a notch, formally putting the 97 companies behind the brief on the other side of a court case from the administration. As with the early condemnations of the executive orders just over a week ago, Amazon is notable by its absence, as is Tesla (whose CEO Elon Musk has continued to sit on the advisory council Uber CEO Travis Kalanick vacated last week). Tesla’s absence is consistent with Musk’s overall stated strategy of trying to bring change from within, but Amazon’s absence may simply be due to the fact that it weighed in on the case separately earlier in the process (though Microsoft has participated at both stages).
Update: this tweet explains that Amazon was asked not to sign the amicus brief because it was a witness in the original case.
via TechCrunch (more coverage on Techmeme)
This Is What Facebook’s Filter Bubble Actually Looks Like – BuzzFeed (Feb 3, 2017)
The topic of fake news and the related topic of filter bubbles has been one BuzzFeed has been particularly strong on in recent months (abuse on Twitter is another). This analysis is fascinating, and shows how even the experience of watching video on Facebook can be colored by the outlets a user chooses to follow. This isn’t quite the same as Facebook’s algorithms showing users different things – in this experiment, the user consciously chose to watch either a Fox News or Fusion live video stream. But it’s a great illustration of how users on Facebook can have completely different experiences even when engaging with the same underlying content.
via BuzzFeed
Google, Apple, Facebook, Uber plan to draft a joint letter opposing Trump’s travel ban – Recode (Feb 2, 2017)
It’s been interesting to watch the early separate responses of big tech companies to the immigration executive orders begin to coalesce into something more like a joined-up response, with both combined efforts on possible lawsuits in states like Washington, and now this letter from several companies. This letter could have focused merely on the practical aspects of the impact of the EOs on the companies and their employees, but goes further than that (at least in the the current draft) to address refugees and use words like compassion, going beyond mere self interest. The letter is measured and offers assistance in finding better ways to address the intended goals of the recent actions on immigration, which is at once less confrontational and also slightly condescending – I’m curious to see if the text evolves at all from this version. At any rate, it’s clear that we’re going to see ongoing engagement at various levels by the tech industry in this issue, including from a number of companies which participate in Trump’s tech councils.
via Recode
Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Results (Feb 1, 2017)
Facebook is surely one of the most predictable tech companies in reporting massive growth and profitability at the moment, and today’s results were no exception. The same drivers that have powered growth were there again in Q4: massive growth in US & Canada ARPU (up 46% year on year), massive growth in users (MAUs up 17% or 269m), increasing ad load and ad prices globally, and ads in new places like Instagram Stories and Messenger. Facebook has even been driving desktop ad revenue again, despite a decline in underlying usage – it was up 22% thanks to better mitigation of ad blockers. The only tiny dark cloud is that this is all ad growth – Facebook’s revenue is absolutely dominated by ads, which were 98% of its revenue in Q4. Non-ad revenue continues to decline, despite its investments in Oculus and other new areas, and will do so throughout 2017 too. If you believe in long-term challenges around ad-based business models, whether for privacy reasons, hitting a ceiling, the perverse incentives they create for businesses that use them, or something else, that could be a problem, especially as Facebook has already said its ad growth will slow in 2017 due to saturating ad load. However, I’m still very bullish on Facebook overall, especially as I think there are lots of untapped markets, not least showing people more content that doesn’t come from their friends, especially video (which was mentioned by Zuckerberg on the call today).
via Facebook
Facebook Loses $500 Million Virtual Reality Headset Verdict – Bloomberg (Feb 1, 2017)
I’ll have more on Facebook earnings shortly, and this is bound to come up, but this is a big loss for Facebook financially as well as embarrassing for some key figures from Mark Zuckerberg through the Oculus employees who were directly impacted in this verdict. Facebook will no doubt appeal, so this isn’t settled yet, and it only adds the equivalent of a quarter of the original purchase price to the $2 billion Facebook spent on Oculus, but it’s not chump change. Given how little revenue Oculus is likely to generate in the near term, this will put the acquisition further into the red for the time being. There are also eery echoes here of the Winkelvoss case against Zuckerberg himself, which of course was settled before a verdict like this was reached. Certainly not how Facebook would want to go into what looks at first glance like a really solid set of earnings.
via Bloomberg
Facebook Tunes Into Television’s Market – WSJ (Jan 31, 2017)
Facebook’s quest to find new places to put ads continues. It’s far from clear what this Apple TV app will actually look like yet – whether a simple feed of all the videos from the user’s News Feed, or something more. Making the jump to TV from mobile is really tough – Facebook on a smartphone neatly fills all those moments during the day between things: waiting for a bus, killing time during a commercial, and so on. I’m not convinced it can make the transition from the thing you do while watching TV to watching TV itself. It’s another one of those cases where the reasons why Facebook would do it are obvious, but the reasons for people to actually use it are far less so.
via WSJ
Facebook Improves Transparency and Deepens Partnerships Around Metrics (Jan 31, 2017)
The other bit of news from Facebook today addresses the recent problems it’s had with unreliable metrics for advertisers and publishers. Some of this is just about providing more metrics for measuring performance on Facebook across various channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network within its own products can be compared with TV and/or print data from wider campaigns), but there’s also news on the third party verification front, which advertisers have been asking for. It now has deeper partnerships with Nielsen and ComScore, and is deepening its viewability measurement tools, as well as adding some additional partnerships. There’s lots here, the detail of which won’t be all that interesting unless you’re directly involved in this stuff, but Facebook is showing some promising willingness to open up more to outside measurement platforms its partners trust as a way of offsetting the embarrassing errors which turned up late last year.
via Facebook
New Signals to Show You More Authentic and Timely Stories – Facebook (Jan 31, 2017)
This is one of two bits of news from Facebook today (the other concerns metrics), this one about dealing with fake news (though that’s a term Facebook continues to eschew in favor of talking about genuineness and authentic communication). Facebook is tweaking its algorithms again to provide better feeds with fewer sensationalist or inaccurate news reports, for example. It looks like this is mostly about ordering within the feed rather than whether something appears there at all, however, which is a nice way of avoiding perceptions of outright censorship, though of course the lower something appears in the feed, the less likely people are to see it. It’s good to see that Facebook continues to tweak its strategy for dealing with fake news, and as with previous moves around news it’ll be very interesting to see how it’s perceived by users and publications.
via Facebook
Facebook Is Trying Everything to Re-Enter China—and It’s Not Working – WSJ (Jan 30, 2017)
This is a great in-depth take on Facebook’s efforts to get back into China following the 2009 moves that saw it effectively blocked from operating in the country. The phrase I saw repeated most frequently in the article? Some version of “[Facebook executive] declined to to be interviewed,” which is indicative of just how carefully Facebook is treading in China – it would clearly like to get back in and compete for those billion-plus potential users along with the local social networks, and has even suggested that it’s willing to put up with a certain amount of censorship, but doesn’t yet seem to feel like the time is right. There would certainly be a big backlash against any censorship-based re-entry, especially if it felt like Facebook was willingly complicit rather than doing the bare minimum to comply, just as Google and Yahoo faced criticism over their activities in China in the past. This is definitely a double-edged sword for Facebook, though it’s not even clear at this point that it would be allowed back in even if it decided to give it a try. The whole piece is worth a read – lots of interesting detail here, much of which is also applicable to other big US tech companies that would like to be more active in China (or already are).
via WSJ
Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat’s users – TechCrunch (Jan 30, 2017)
This would be very bad news if it turns out to be true – celebrities and those who manage celebrity and other accounts on Snapchat claim they’re seeing a significant reduction in views of their Stories on Snapchat as a result of both Instagram’s launch of its own Stories feature and Snapchat’s move to kill the Auto-Advance feature for Stories in its own app. This kind of thing is always worth taking with a pinch of salt – the ranges discussed here are very broad, and some of the data might be outliers – but the trend seems to be consistently downward, and is backed up by some app download data as well. The positive spin from Snap here would be that it’s actually focusing engagement more by only showing users the Stories they actually choose to see, but I’m not sure investors will buy that. Again, any day now we should have some real data from Snap to go on to evaluate engagement and usage, but this is another specific concern they’ll need to address in the S-1 filing. In the meantime, more evidence that Facebook and Instagram’s strategy here is paying off, and that when Facebook broadly launches its own Stories feature the impact could be even more severe.
via TechCrunch
Silicon Valley’s responses to Trump’s immigration executive orders, from strongest to weakest – The Verge (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a good summary of the responses from the tech industry so far to President Trump’s executive orders on immigration from Friday. It also does a nice job sorting the responses by strength – there’s quite a range in the responses, from those focusing narrowly on the practical impacts on employees of each company to those issuing broader moral condemnations of the policy. This certainly won’t be the last we hear on this topic. It’s notable that as of right now Amazon is one of the major holdouts among the big consumer tech companies.
via The Verge
Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg Chime in on Trump Policies (Jan 27, 2017)
In the last day or so, both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have chimed in on different Trump administration policies in Facebook posts. Sandberg had been criticized for being so silent on some of the administration’s policies regarding women, given that she’s been such an advocate for women, and has now chimed in on abortion policy in overseas aid. Zuckerberg voiced opinions about immigration policy, specifically the restrictions on immigration which are apparently about to go into effect. I won’t comment on the specific policies in detail here, other than to say that like many people I’m disheartened by the speed with which immigration policy is changing in ways that will have devastating effects on many immigrants, whether refugees or people here on a green card. The point from the perspective of this site is that these are some of the first public statements from executives at major tech companies to critique specific policies of the Trump administration, while most tech companies seem to be treading very carefully at the moment, presumably for fear of becoming targets of angry tweets or threats. I wonder if we’ll see that change in subtle ways in the coming weeks and months, with Facebook potentially leading the way. Importantly, none of the comments from Zuckerberg or Sandberg are vitriolic, but instead are very measured (Zuckerberg’s in particular are quite balanced on several different issues within the broad umbrella of immigration policy). There’s clearly room for constructive engagement here.
via Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
Apple Officially Joins Partnership on AI (Jan 27, 2017)
I commented on the reports that Apple was about to join the Partnership on AI yesterday, so I won’t revisit all of this today. Two notable things from today’s announcement, though: Apple’s representative will be Tom Gruber, who runs Siri at Apple, and that may be indicative of where Apple sees ownership of AI residing within the company (it has no formal head of AI); secondly, Apple has been involved with the Partnership from the outset, but hadn’t formalized its membership until today. That might signify that there were some details of Apple’s membership which needed to be worked out before it felt comfortable joining -I’d love to know what those were. Separately from Apple’s involvement, it’s worth noting that the board now has representatives from a number of other organizations beyond tech companies including several universities. So the Partnership won’t just be about driving the agenda of the tech industry here.
Facebook wants you to watch longer videos, so it’s going to show you longer videos – Recode (Jan 26, 2017)
“Facebook wants to sell mid-roll video ads, so it’s going to show you more longer videos” would be an even more direct reading of this situation. Facebook recently began introducing mid-roll video ads, but of course those don’t do any good if the videos people watch are too short to hit the point where an ad would be shown. And Facebook has arguably trained its audience and content providers to prefer short videos, because those tend to grab attention better and lend themselves better to the soundless auto-play scenario that dominates video viewing on Facebook now. In order, then, to feed users more video ads, Facebook needs first to feed users longer videos, and it’s tweaked its algorithms to show more longer videos than before. On the surface, this is about fairness – percentage completion rates are always going to be lower for longer videos for short ones, and so some weighting is required to measure performance fairly. But this is really a fairly transparent way to provide yet more slots for Facebook ads, as with this week’s testing of banner ads in Messenger. As with that announcement, Facebook is here going to begin bumping up against the natural limits of how many ads its users will tolerate, and will have to be very careful.
via Recode (official blog post here)