Narrative: Facebook's Power
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
★ Facebook Reports More Rapid Revenue Growth, High Profits in Q2 (Jul 26, 2017)
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Facebook Acquires Content Identification Team and Technology Company Source3 (Jul 24, 2017)
Facebook has made a small acquisition in the content identification space, buying Source3 and bringing on board its technology and people. The company majored on identifying copyright-infringing material, especially in user-generated content, something that Facebook has been working on for some time but clearly hasn’t cracked yet. As with YouTube in its early days, albeit at a very different scale, Facebook appears to have put growing its video business ahead of its ability to monitor that content for IP infringements, and is now scrambling to catch up. Copyright infringements are a big issue for Facebook, which has been accused of not doing enough to stop it in not just recorded video but live video, so it needs acquisitions like this one to speed up its progress in this area. This one seems likely to have been small – the company had only raised $4 million in venture funding, so it’s likely that it went for some low multiple of that, making it eminently affordable in Facebook terms.
via Recode
Regulators and Academics Begin Pondering Breaking up Big Tech Companies (Jul 24, 2017)
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Facebook Provides Official Update on Progress Working with News Organizations (Jul 20, 2017)
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Study Finds Publication Recall is Poor for News Reached through Search and Social (Jul 20, 2017)
A study from Oxford University suggests that people who read news articles they find through search engines or social media have much poorer recall of the names of the publications than those who visit those sites directly. Those finding articles through search recalled the names correctly 37% of the time two days later, while those going through social channels recalled 47% correctly, compared with 81% for direct visitors. That’s entirely what I would expect anecdotally, but it’s still stark, and a good indicator of why news organizations seem so unhappy with the role of companies like Google and Facebook even though they seem little pacified by those companies’ efforts to better meet their needs. At root, this isn’t just a monetization or traffic problem but a fundamental disintermediation of the relationship between these publications and their audiences, which causes much lower brand recall and loyalty and removes much of the power to drive traffic from the publications themselves. That’s pretty much impossible to fix, and that’s a challenge both for news publishers and for the platforms, which would like to smooth things over with them but are relatively powerless to do so without big changes in the way they operate. However, the details of the study are well worth reading too – the differences aren’t consistent across publications, suggesting that at least some have broken through the challenges of aggregation and established distinctive enough brands for themselves to achieve recall anyway, so there is at least some hope. The whole article here is well worth a read.
Facebook Confirms News Subscriptions Coming in October (Jul 19, 2017)
Campbell Brown, the former news anchor Facebook appointed as head of News Partnerships in January, has finally confirmed what’s been rumored for some time now, namely that Facebook is readying a subscription product for newspapers. It sounds like it will adopt the familiar though not universal approach of allowing readers to access ten articles before having to pay for a subscription to a given publication, though it’s not clear that the ten articles will include those readers read separately in their browsers, so that will be a key point for papers to nail down before signing up. Another will be payments and how those will work, since Facebook still doesn’t have credit card details from the vast majority of its users. Since some publications don’t allow any free articles before the paywall kicks in, this won’t be a perfect or universal solution, but on paper should neutralize one of the big criticisms of Facebook’s gobbling up of news consumption. However, given that this has been in the works for some time, and the largest publications will be aware of that, the recent PR push by the News Media Alliance against both Facebook and Google suggests that it certainly won’t assuage all their concerns. Update: also today, Facebook announced analytics for Instant Articles with support from Nielsen, to allow publishers to compare results from their IA and web-based versions. The lack of comparable analytics has been another bugbear for the news organizations using IA, so this should check another box in resolving those concerns, at least on paper.
via TheStreet
Major Newspapers Seek Legal Cover for Collective Bargaining with Facebook and Google (Jul 10, 2017)
The News Media Alliance, an industry group representing major newspapers, is beginning a push, launched with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from its president, to get permission from Congress to act collectively in negotiating with Facebook and Google. I’m linking here to a piece in the New York Times on the topic, but it’s from the media columnist and therefore almost as much opinion as reporting, something I’ve found with most of the stories on this, which feels a little ironic. But the thrust of both the op-ed and the opinion side of the New York Times piece is that the news industry is being lorded over by the digital giants, and that single publications or even media groups are powerless to negotiate better relationships without being able to bargain collectively. That, in turn, would be a violation of antitrust rules unless Congress were to pass legislation providing legal cover, something it seems rather unlikely to do, especially in the current political climate. The op-ed is disingenuous to say the least – this is the money quote, in my opinion: “But the two digital giants don’t employ reporters: They don’t dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last night’s game to get the highlights. They expect an economically squeezed news industry to do that costly work for them.” That feels like a distortion of the true relationship here, which is that Google and Facebook both point people to the content those people find interesting, including content from major newspapers. If those newspapers decide to make that content available for free either on their sites or through Instant Articles or AMP, that’s their decision. But that’s not nearly the same as those companies doing that work “for” Google or Facebook. While the idea that the newspapers face an imbalance of power in negotiating individually with Facebook and Google has more merit, it’s also disingenuous to argue that these two companies are somehow singlehandedly responsible for the inequitable distribution of advertising revenue between them, given their respective audience sizes and all else that ails newspapers and their business models. At the same time, it’s worth noting that Facebook is pushing ahead with its plans for subscriptions and other improvements to how it works with publishers, but publications including the New York Times continue to be skeptical of those changes, which makes one wonder just what these papers would kind of relationship with these companies the papers would find acceptable. All of this merely reinforces my sense that the companies don’t really have any solutions to propose, but in fact are angling for some kind of punitive regulatory action against these companies on the basis of their size and influence.
Facebook Beats User Privacy Lawsuit, Fights Gag Order over Government Searches (Jul 3, 2017)
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Weekly Narrative Video – Facebook’s Power (Jul 1, 2017)
This week’s narrative video is on the Facebook’s Power narrative, which feels particularly relevant in the week that Facebook announced 2 billion total monthly active users globally. But it’s a narrative that’s also been in the news in other ways, including the leak this week of Facebook’s training for its moderators, its ongoing efforts to provide Internet access with drones and through other means, and news about enabling subscriptions for news organizations. And yet Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also seem more reflective lately on the role Facebook plays in the world, and how it can be more of a force for good. Subscribers can watch the video on the narrative page here as always, and if you’re not yet a subscriber you can sign up for a 30-day free trial here and get access too.
Facebook’s Aquila Internet Drone has Second Flight, This Time with No Crash (Jun 29, 2017)
One of Facebook’s numerous connectivity efforts is its Aquila unmanned aircraft for delivering Internet access in remote or unconnected areas. The first test flight earlier this year ended in a crash, something Facebook wasn’t entirely forthcoming about before an NTSB investigation revealed the details. The second flight happened about a month ago, but Facebook seems to have waited until now to talk about it for some reason, and it seems to have gone rather better. It was still short – under two hours, relative to the months Facebook expects Aquila to stay in the air eventually – and the landing is still a little awkward given that the aircraft has no landing gear, but Facebook seems to be making progress. At F8 in April, Facebook talked about its various internet connectivity efforts, and put Aquila firmly in the long-term bucket, saying it would take up to 10 years to get the project up and running, so that’s useful context for these efforts and the PR around them, which is mostly feel-good stuff and has little bearing on anything the company might do commercially in the near term. The other connectivity efforts including millimeter wave wireless technology for cities, and tethered antennas for emergency sites or rural areas seem to have nearer-term launch prospects, but it’s hard to see any of them delivering a meaningful boost to the addressable market for Facebook, which is arguably the whole point of these initiatives. But expanding the addressable market is going to be critical as Facebook pushes from 2 billion to 3 billion users, as I wrote in my blog post earlier this week.
via Business Insider (see also Facebook’s own post)