Facebook moving non-promoted posts out of news feed in trial

Bad News For For Small Publishers

[vegasrick]

New system could destroy smaller publishers if implemented, after journalists report drop in organic reach – but users will still see their friends’ posts

[theguardian.com...]

[engine]

Non-paid Pages and stories have been a struggle for some time now, so it's not a surprise to me to see this.
I notice a lot of people share their Page posts so that friends see them, and I wonder if this will become more prevalent.

You're right, the smaller publishers are likely to suffer, and that's the vast majority.

[Shaddows]

NEWS: Publicly traded company makes presentational changes to encourage commercial entities to pay for access to huge customer base.

Next up: Just what are bears doing in the trees?

Later: Exclusive "Revelations" of Pope's Religious Proclivities.

[EditorialGuy]

How do users feel about it? (I suspect that a lot of them won't even notice.)

[engine]

Not only does the test suggest the end of the relatively low cost ride for smaller entities, it might also mean the end of an era for the smaller publishers and businesses. It looks like twitter is going to be one of the few really free services.

[engine]

Added
Facebook seems to have reacted to the apparent negative messages over this test, and has said it has no further plans to roll this test out globally.
[media.fb.com...]

That's an unusual move to clarify so swiftly, so it's clearly been moved by the reaction.

[graeme_p]

It will eventually happen. Why should FB give up the opportunity to charge for this?

I have always thought this will happen, and the test proves that it is something FB think can work.

[EditorialGuy]

Facebook is the AOL of the 21st Century. 'Nuff said.

[elos42]

Let me give another perspective.

We too have a news website. But we don't do clickbait headlines. We don't exaggerate, and we normally deal in 'real news' and not stuff like 'dog saved kittens that fell into a ditch' news.

We do have a few thousand people who follow us on our topic specific pages, but nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of people that follow 'cats and dogs' news websites and the purveyors of fake news.

We get about 5% of our traffic from FB. My friend, who heads one of these 'woman beats the crap out of molester' websites, gets about 50% of hers from FB.

I think this may actually be a good thing, from the perspective of disrupting the business model of these websites and driving people to more mature news outlets? Or do people really want only the fluffy stuff and not real news anymore?

[graeme_p]

Or do people really want only the fluffy stuff and not real news anymore?

I think FB tends to drive that sort of stuff and will do so regardless of this, because that stuff gets heavily shared on FB anyway. They might have to work a bit harder to get the initial momentum going for each item, but not enough to substantially change things.

People are very, very uncritical about what they share on FB. FB is built to encourage that because it works in terms of user engagement with FB.

[mcneely]

... so it's clearly been moved by the reaction.

Or that millions of small page owners still aren't going to spend the money to let Facebook spam their ads to totally irrelevant and uninterested news feeds anyway -

Or do people really want only the fluffy stuff and not real news anymore?

People don't want the news - They want to be entertained -- There's way more money to be made through deceptive stories than ever before -- Tabloids exist for a reason, and that's why fake news is as ever present on Facebook as it ever was.

Facebook should just cut to the chase and be done with all of this game playing -- They should start a subscription service and be done with it --

[mack]

I think this will lead to a lot of businesses setting up personal profiles as opposed to business pages on Facebook. This is perhaps one of my biggest pet peeves with the service. Getting a "friend request" from a company.

Mack.

[EditorialGuy]

Facebook: "I never promised you a rose garden. (Just a walled garden.)"

[tangor]

Just follow the money (shareholders do!).