Company / division: Facebook
Instagram Says Error Allowed Hackers to Obtain Celebrity Email Addresses, Phone Numbers (Aug 30, 2017)
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Facebook Disables Advertising for Sites That Repeatedly Share Fake News Links (Aug 28, 2017)
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Facebook Hires Former NYT Public Editor as Consultant to Improve Transparency (Aug 25, 2017)
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Facebook and Google Dominate Top 10 US Apps List (Aug 24, 2017)
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Facebook and Twitter Sign Deals with New Network Stadium for Sports Video (Aug 24, 2017)
Yesterday, Facebook announced a deal with Stadium to provide sports video content, and today Twitter made a very similar announcement. Stadium is a recently launched sports network which leverages Sinclair’s broadcasting infrastructure and streaming capabilities from Silver Chalice (a subsidiary of the Chicago White Sox organization) and in-studio talent from 120 Sports. Its sports rights are mostly for second-tier conferences, so there won’t be many high-profile games available, and essentially all the content is also available for free on Stadium’s own website and where broadcast. So there’s no exclusivity and little real value here and this is mostly about adding tonnage of live video on two platforms which are still in the early stages of that effort. The challenge in sports, of course, continues to be that the major rights are sewn up for years by big names from the TV industry, with rare exceptions like Thursday Night Football’s digital rights offering the only real opportunities to snag them in the near term. And yet sports is about the only must-have category of live TV left among these platform’s core audiences, leaving them in this awkward position of adding lots of marginal content just to check a sports box.
via Mashable
★ Facebook Consolidates Hardware Efforts, Plans Speakers, Other Devices for 2018 (Aug 23, 2017)
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Facebook Adds News Organization Logos to Article Links to Raise Brand Profiles (Aug 22, 2017)
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Facebook Use Among US Teens Will Start to Fall, Says eMarketer (Aug 22, 2017)
Analyst firm eMarketer has revised its usage forecasts for Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat for the coming year, and although there’s lots of data there, the point the media has latched onto is that it’s predicting use of the core Facebook app among US teens will fall this year. Though I have to imagine eMarketer is basing all this on some kind of survey of teens (notoriously difficult to do), there’s no mention of any such survey in the article from eMarketer, so I’m curious to know precisely what the foundation is, especially given that falling Facebook use by teens has been talked about for years but never seems to have materialized in a discernible way in Facebook’s reporting. None of this, though, is all that surprising, given that Snapchat and Instagram between them seem to have a lock on teens’ social media use, both driven by the increasingly raw and personal sharing these platforms enable in contrast to the broadcast nature of most Facebook sharing. While Facebook has steadily embraced its identity as a time sink filled with content loosely connected to people you know, these other platforms continue to major on true social interactions and therefore are more appealing to those at a stage of life where that’s the most important aspect of social media. Without Instagram, Facebook would potentially be staring a massive liability in the face at this point given that all its organic efforts to compete with Snapchat have crashed and burned, but with it, the company has managed to participate in rather than merely suffer from this trend among teens. And it’s now seeing the upside at least as much as the downside, with several times the user base of Snapchat overall and nearly equally high engagement. As such, I’m not sure any of these needs to be a worry for Facebook even if it’s true, as long as the trend doesn’t spread to older age groups and lead to broader disengagement from Facebook, and as long as Instagram is able to continue to capture its share of teen social media use.
via eMarketer
Facebook has Sprawling, Unfocused Plans for Marketplace (Aug 18, 2017)
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Facebook’s Oculus Patents AR Glasses Despite Far-Off Timeframe for Launch (Aug 18, 2017)
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Facebook Launches In-Stream-Only Video Ad Options as Inventory Grows (Aug 17, 2017)
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Online Platforms Are Toughening Stances on Content Over Charlottesville Events (Aug 15, 2017)
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Tech Giants File Amicus Brief with Supreme Court on Phone Data and Privacy (Aug 15, 2017)
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Facebook Launches Redesigns of News Feed and Instagram Comments (Aug 15, 2017)
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Facebook is Testing Using Location to Serve Ads to People Who Visited Stores (Aug 15, 2017)
Based on observations of the new method in the wild, Marketing Land says Facebook appears to be testing showing people ads on Facebook based on the physical retail stores they have recently visited, leveraging location data from the Facebook app. If people already think that being retargeted on Facebook based on shopping on other sites is creepy, this is going to blow their minds, especially because many people may not realize that Facebook is even able to track their location when they’re not actively using the app. That background location tracking is used to power some services in the app, and in the iOS privacy settings, Facebook can be set only to use location while in the app, but there doesn’t seem to be a similar option on Android, where all I can see is a single on-off location toggle per app at an OS level. None of this should surprise us, however: the name of the game in advertising is targeting, and the more available the better as far as these companies are concerned. As long as there’s some disclosure somewhere of what’s being gathered and why, and consumers have an opt-out option, they’ll feel they’re covered. But between Snapchat’s recent moves in the opposite direction and this testing by Facebook, it feels like we may be about to wade into our first real set of privacy concerns around major social networks in several years, after companies pulled back significantly a few years back following something of a backlash. Users have been like the proverbial frogs in boiling water since, with the erosion of privacy so subtle and incremental as to never present a single step big enough to warrant objections, but I suspect that may be about to change.
via Marketing Land
Facebook Quietly Tests Chinese App Waters with Moments Clone (Aug 11, 2017)
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Facebook Acquires Tech to Add or Remove Objects in Videos (Aug 11, 2017)
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Facebook Announces List of Shows Created for its New Watch Video Tab (Aug 10, 2017)
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★ Facebook Launches Watch, a New Tab for Video Including Original Content (Aug 9, 2017)
Right after both Business Insider and Mashable posted sourced stories about it launching tomorrow, Facebook appears to have decided to take the wraps off its new video tab today instead. That this was coming was widely reported, and now we just know a few more details – the new tab in Facebook is called Watch, and will showcase lots of different kinds of videos, although the focus appears to be on personality-driven stuff of the sort that dominates the more popular YouTube channels. In general, the model here feels very YouTube-like, with a subscription model, though Facebook’s apps for TV platforms in recent months have signaled the broad structure and interface, with a combination of videos recommended or liked by friends, things you’ve saved, things that are popular on the platform, and so on. What I don’t see much of in Facebook’s announcement today is the longer form, more produced stuff that’s supposed to be coming too, probably because it’s not ready yet. There will be some other content in there too including the live MLB coverage Facebook acquired rights to a while back starting next season, but in general this is a hub for all kinds of video on Facebook, from professionally produced stuff to the stuff your friends share. Simply calling out video into its own tab, though, is going to raise its profile and thereby push people to spend more time in videos, where they’ll see ads only every few minutes, as opposed to scrolling through the News Feed, where they’ll see ads every few seconds. I’m more and more convinced that’s a risky move for Facebook, because all the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen so far suggests people are really put off by interruptive ads in Facebook videos (I certainly am too), and this whole effort could end up backfiring. That’s something I’m hoping to write about soon. Update: Variety has a listing of additional shows from professional producers which wasn’t in Facebook’s blog post.
via Facebook
Facebook Attempts to Remove Accidental Ad Clicks from Reporting (Aug 8, 2017)
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