Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he wants to shift Facebook away from "passive" content to more active, "engaging" content. In other words, your Facebook newsfeed will soon replace the content that you might merely click on with content that you and your friends are more likely to engage with.
In other words, the pages that post 30 times per day hoping they can monopolize the newsfeeds of their "readers" will be penalized. Facebook traffic is going to shift heavily to brands that are dramatically more engaging.
Of course, this transformation has led to instant backlash from a wide variety of internet publishers -- probably because they don't really understand what Mark was saying, why he said it, or what the consequences of Facebook's easy-to-manipulate passive content ecosystem have been so far.
I founded one of the most popular political websites in the world. It began with an important mission: speaking truth to power by giving a voice to the forgotten middle class.
In the past, I wrote headlines for articles that reached over 15,000,000 users on Facebook. From a single posting. On a single page.
I've written articles that have been read by millions and millions of people from Facebook. No, I don't mean "seen" by millions of people. I mean millions of people clicked on the actual link and read the message crafted to influence their political interpretation of the world.
My site's style focused on the sizzling elements of stories that the Wall Street Journal and even Fox News didn’t want to cover. It was a perfect marriage with Facebook's algorithm because it ignored branding and focused on whether users would click on stories.
It was good storytelling. It was fun. And it worked frighteningly well.
Realistically, my personal headlines and articles had drastically more reach than the entire "Russian interference" scandal covered by mainstream outlets like the New York Times. So when it comes to the algorithm change and the implications, I'm speaking from the position of someone who has utilized this algorithm more than almost anyone on earth.
Still, the ecosystem that allowed what I was able to do is now mostly gone - and that's a good thing.
Visionless people look for consistency regardless of context. Some want the ecosystem that existed 4-5 years ago to be all that exists going forward. That's disturbingly short-sighted.
In the past, alternative media needed a huge boost to shake up the narrative. Now we're in a weird place where those same alternative media brands acquired too much power, and we need to change things again.
I now run the Conservative Institute, a very different project. It seeks to provide reliable, trustworthy news for conservatives in an era where dishonesty has become a fundamental pillar of the right-wing media ecosystem. The goal of CI content is not to "go viral" - it's to simply tell the truth. Accuracy is the primary goal, come what may.
We don't defend Trump when he's wrong. We don't attack liberals when they're right. We only report what we believe to be important stories that should circulate on the right wing - and everywhere. A typical article will link to sources like the New York Times, federal agencies, and PDFs of actual studies.
Now, Facebook seems to be responding to the same basic issues that CI was built to combat: a social media ecosystem that replaced high-quality, investigative journalism with shallow "passive" content mostly ripped quickly from other - often just as shallow - sources.
To better understand what's happening, let's look at the following basic concepts that provide context for the Facebook change.
Never in the history of the world was it so easy to reach so many people with a message.
I know people who had no experience in marketing, journalism, research, or much of anything else, reach thousands of people with low-quality stories mostly lifted from other sources.
In fact, ripping off my projects was a pretty easy way for someone with no talent or instincts to make a healthy six-figure income. It happened frequently.
That entire system was incredibly powerful for shaking things up. Now, we're in a different situation - the balance has shifted from the Associated Press, NBC, and local newspapers to an army of smaller sites that often spread misinformation, nasty accusations, or outright lies. Another way to describe it? Fake news.
The algorithms that decided how many people would see content didn't account for "accuracy" at all. Who cares if a fake story goes viral? It was getting the clicks and shares it needed to get more and more traffic on Facebook. That's a massive design flaw, especially when alternative media became so powerful.
This was a temporary hiccup in world history. "Alternative" and "mainstream" media aren't the future - quality media is, regardless of where on the political spectrum it may fall.
Everyone has an ignorant family member known for accidentally sharing fake news stories they didn't verify. The idea that a global media distribution system should give that person just as much power as someone who isn't as gullible is absurd.
I don't mean this in a condescending manner at all. I'm ignorant of many things just like you are. But many people simply don't have the time or expertise in media and geopolitics to know what source should be considered "trustworthy" and what source is taking them for a ride.
If anything, this system isn’t even fair to the person falling for the fake news - the distribution system should minimize the lies that show up in that person's newsfeed as well.
Some will huff and puff over what I just said, pretending they deeply care about ignorant people having the right to easy access to fake and misleading news. The problem is that this is mostly bad-faith virtue signaling.
Let me be blunt: passive-content farms/publishers don't respect their audiences. They often laugh at them. It’s easy to get rich off of people who don’t know any better.
Those market incentives are largely gone, and that's a wonderful thing.
"Passive" content is content that requires no investment from the reader. You don't have to have any kind of relationship with the brand or the content. It's content that happens to be in your feed, and you just may find it interesting enough to click on and read without comment - or not. Most of the content in your newsfeed is like this.
You probably have no emotional connection to the brand and if you click on the story, you may skim it or watch some video, and then exit out and never think about it again. No comments, no shares, no personal connection - nothing. It's passive content.
"Passive content" is where fake news comes from. It's the ecosystem that allows fake news to flourish. It's the system built on a series of economic incentives that allow bad faith publishers to make money manipulating you for fun and profit.
There are a few brands that manage to engage me with almost all of their content; Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday, Bloomberg, The Art of Manliness, etc. I engage with their community, share their links to my personal page, and have a connection to the brands themselves. They don't just happen to show up on my feed and trick me into clicking.
I have a deep appreciation of the personalities behind the content. That's vital. That's good. And that's the future.
If your business model is based on easy traffic from one website, that's your problem, not Facebook's problem.
As the founder of Axios said to the Wall Street Journal:
"Facebook is a public company that controls its own decisions... Publishers should do the same damn thing."
This isn't new. Copyblogger, (a resource any content marketer should see as kind of like a regularly updated Bible), wrote years ago:
"If you're relying on Facebook or Google to bring in all of your new customers, you're sharecropping. You’re hoping the landlord will continue to like you and support your business, but the fact is, the landlord has no idea who you are and doesn’t actually care."
The future will still have plenty of content. The future will still have plenty of news. But it won't be low-quality content lifted from other sources without any attempt at providing extra value like additional context, additional sources, or additional facts.
The future belongs to quality publishers with strong brands and vibrant communities. This is the way it's been for centuries - and this is the way it will continue to be for centuries more.
If Facebook's change is going to harm your business, then discover higher-quality, more long-term oriented workarounds. Build an online "TV" show. Launch a podcast. Write a book. Go to other platforms. But don't blame Facebook for not allowing you cheap access to a gravy train.
Facebook's "trending" news section currently includes a statement by Alibaba founder and CEO Jack Ma. The soundbite is going viral.
Ma suggested, much to the dismay of business leaders around the planet, that fake goods from China are actually better than the real products.
Most are laughing at Ma, but I think he's making a great point and it's part of a multi-trillion dollar disruption going on in manufacturing and physical product marketing.
What Jack Ma Actually Said
Jack Ma was being questioned about all of the endless fake and counterfeit and "knock off" products that are for sale in bulk on Alibaba.com, a website that is essentially an Amazon.com for people looking to buy products to sell through repackaging.
Here's what Ma actually said:
"The problem is that the fake products today, they make better quality, better prices than the real products, the real names. It's not the fake products that destroy them, it's the new business models."
This isn't nearly as bad as it's being made out to be. It's also not wrong, in many cases. Let's do a quick review of some facts most people don't understand.
2 Facts to Keep in Mind
Jack Ma has a front-seat view of some massive economic shifts going on right now. He understands two very important facts:
If you buy a knock off watch, there's a fairly good chance it's made at the same factory as the big name brands - it just doesn't have the same brand.
This is especially true for easy to make products. Private labeling as an industry is changing how people view products.
That's why some companies, like the app Wish, are based on getting cheap private labeled products into the hands of consumers - they can be just a fraction of the cost, but have the same qualities as the name brand.
The above point touches on something that is difficult to wrap one's mind around at first: branding is largely an illusion.
If a small firm makes a product with identical quality as Apple, most people will think the apple product is higher quality because they believe in the illusion of the brand.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can make decision making simpler and more efficient. But if you're spending more for a same-quality brand, then you might be missing the point.
This illusion is starting to crumble. It probably won't fully go away, but people are deconstructing what "name brand" means in the first place. This is incredibly interesting, and a sign of things to come, especially in ecommerce.
The Future of Manufacturing and Branding
As things progress, we're going to see more and more "same quality" products that will rival top brands.
Amazon recently started launching more of their own "branded" products that just slap on the Amazon label to a high-quality no-brand (previously, at least) product. This is making huge changes for all sorts of industries, especially in fitness and tech.
This trend is only going to get stronger. If you sell a fairly benign product and make money from your brand value, you'll still have many options for huge profits - but you'll want to make sure you pick the right product.
Generic products like "lase mouse" or "keyboard" are going to run into problems. Specific products like "gaming mouse" and "programmer keyboard" will likely be more promising, but we'll see how it plays out.
