From Reuters:
In the latest Reuters Institute report almost half of publishers (44%) expressed more concern about the power and influence of platforms than this time last year.
This year marks major changes in the relationship between publishers and platforms. In January, Facebook announced changes to its news feed. The news feed is set to favor user content over posts from businesses, brands and the media.
. . . .
Many publishers are investing in influencers to grow. Influencers tend to be bloggers, vloggers or celebrities. Last year, Cosmopolitan launched an influencer network, allowing clients to partner with and integrate influencer-generated content for campaigns.
Blasting News, a social news platform has built 102 million monthly visitors by creating a network of micro-influencers. Influencers are paid to contribute and there are communities built around specific topics, such as Game of Thrones. Currently. The site currently has 1500 influencers contributing.
. . . .
Last year The Boston Globe launched a private, subscriber-only Facebook group. Now it has around 3000 members. According to Matt Karolian, director of audience engagement at the Globe, an average post in the group attracts nearly double the number of comments as a post on the site’s main Facebook page.
Link to the rest at Reuters
“What can publishers do about Facebook’s news feed changes?”
The same thing you do with AOL or ADT begging you to come back, you ignore them and move on.
I’ll admit I post the cover of my latest ebook when I have it up on Amazon, but that’s the only time I even logged in to fb last year.
As far as ‘publishers’? I follow/check the sites of a couple self-pubs I like, but I haven’t seen a reason to bother with what the big boys think is important …
For once, I’d like to see publishers talk of *building* their own platform instead of whining that other people don’t operate their platforms/business to serve the needs of publishers.
Yeah, that’ll be a cold day in the Brazillian rainforest.
Come on Felix. What about the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Paris Review, etc.? What are they but publisher plats? 🙂
A bit last millennium, but yeah.
I guess…
Such as they are.
And they do reach “everybody that really matters”, right?
But they do keep whining about other people’s platforms not serving their interests alone.
For their time, they did a good job. I’ve noticed that the better you are at something, the less likely that you will move on when the time comes.
Indeed.
Especially in the tech world it is rare the company that can bridge multiple tech generations much less demographic generations. The IBMs, HPs, and MICROSOFTs are rare. More typical are the DECs, SUNs, BORLANDs, et al.
The more effective they are in a narrow niche, the more vulnerable they are to disruption from without that niche. The expression “fat, dumb, and happy” often applies.
The classic example is DEC, where sales rep David Ahl went to the CEO ca 1974 with what was to all intents and purposes a PC and was dismissed with the line: Why would anybody want a home computer?
http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbybit/bit-by-bit-contents/chapter-9/9-5-ahl-advocates-for-the-personal-computer/
When it comes to the Kindle ecosystem Amazon didn’t rest on their early success and they expanded from the proprietary eink readers to PCs, tablets, and phones, and are one of a handful of players with a browser-based reader.
It’s going to take serious creativity to find a commercial ebook niche Amazon isn’t already playing in.
As for Facebook, the important news is how *They* are treating news and publishers: as a problematic resource to be managed rather than a core constituency.
Smart folks.
I mainly go to FB to hang out in private groups that deal with topics of interest to me. Sometimes I don’t even check out my own author page. And FB’s stats are a joke when one new user can show up as 100% improvement, one loss as 100% decline.
I’ve all but stopped using FB because they won’t let me determine what I want in my feed. Anymore, there’s no difference between liking and sharing because if you like something it ends up in your friends’ feeds. (And what they like ends up in mine.) I have to use a specific URL to get it to come up in chronological order instead of “popular” order. And of course, someone who’s judgement I don’t trust is deciding what’s “fake news” and what isn’t. In short, it’s just gotten to be a mess and way more trouble than it’s worth.
The problem with all these ‘free’ platforms, and here I’ll include WordPress as well, is that they build their influence using our free content but never acknowledge the ‘value’ of that content.
Then, once they reach a certain critical mass, they try to double dip by squeezing the advertising dollar at the expense of the user.
This probably works beautifully for shareholders, but I see this almost inevitable tactic as the beginning of the end for the platform itself. Once it loses the trust of its users, that trust is very hard to get back. Sure, they’ll hang around for a while because there’s nothing else, but the instant something new and shiny comes along, they’ll be gone.
This is a pattern that we’ve seen before, but somehow no one recognizes the pattern until the damage is done. -shrug-