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Far too many people seem to think Facebook was doing the publishers a favour by showing news stories, so this is a thread to explain what was really going on, and why Facebook needed the news. <-- Note the past tense. We'll come back to that.
Social networks have three growth vectors. The number of people on the network, the amount of time each person spends on the network, and the number of ads they're shown.
The number of people is a vector you can drive through really good product implementation, hype, and 'network effects' a.k.a., FOMO.
The time a person spends on the network depends on the velocity of content. Put simply, if there's lots of good new stuff every time they come back, they'll come back more often.
And the number of ads each person sees depends on the 'ad load' and session depth. i.e., The more content you have, the more ads you can stick into the feed.
But the problem is that networks follow the 80/20 rule. 20% (or, in practice, even fewer) of the users create 80% of the engagement. For proof, just go to Facebook and count how many people's posts constitute your top 100. Then divide that by the number of people in your network.
This 80/20 rule creates two problems. First, it's boring to see updates from the same 20 people all the time. And second, even those 20 people only have so much to share.
This means that in practice there's a limit on how much content you have, to
a) keep users coming back, and
b) interweave ads into
a) keep users coming back, and
b) interweave ads into
But you know who does have content? Lots and lots of content. Content that is constantly changing. And content that also creates FOMO. News publishers.
If you can get news into the feed, you can solve your two biggest problems after new user acquisition. And if you're a really smart network, you can even turn this content into a flywheel for engagement.
See, the thing you ultimately want as a network, is for people to be talking to each other. It doesn't matter if they're being nice or nasty - so long as they're interacting, that's what going to keep them coming back.
So, you create an algorithm that changes the news stories each user sees. You work out which ones get people really mad. And you give all these angry people places (i.e., Groups) in which to congregate and amplify each other's anger.
Now, you've got a money machine. Best of all, you're not even paying for any of this. You can just focus on selling ads, and the rest takes care of itself. Life's good. But unfortunately, this won't go on for ever.
While you're focusing on minting money you notice two things. First, video ads are bringing in the biggest bucks. And second, people are getting mad about all the anger and misinformation your algorithms are amplifying. Uh oh.
Pretty soon, all that wonderful news content has turned into a giant pain in the ass. In fact, you realised you've painted yourself into a corner. People are mad when you suppress the news, and they're also mad when you don't. All that anger you've created is now directed at you.
You're getting raked by politicians and threatened with regulation. Your brand is circling the drain. Even the advertisers are arcing up.
You wish you could just go back to selling ads and not having to worry about any of this. Ironically, you've now got so much user-generated video you don't even need news any more. You'd be better off sticking all that video in people's feeds and just getting rid of the news.
But the question is how. You could do a gradual swap of news with video. You could move news out of the feed entirely, and into a separate 'news' tab that most people will be too lazy to read. Or, you could...
Oh. Hello, Australia. You want us to do what? Pay for news, you say? Or remove it? Wow. That's amazing. Ok, done.
Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?
