Why Facebook Needs A Separate News Feed For Publishers
Last week Facebook did that thing it does where it acts like Lucy with the football and advertisers and publishers are Charlie Brown. After spending much time and effort to convince publishers to adopt its Instant Articles platform, Facebook unilaterally changed the algorithm for its news feed so that articles from friends and family showed up first.This understandably made the publishing community pretty angry as Facebook had most definitely talked up all the traffic they were going to get from all their articles showing up in people’s news feeds. Oh, and it would have been nice if Facebook had bothered to give them a head’s up.Ooops.In a similar vein, it seems that there’s a growing concern that Facebook users, seeing a steady array of professional videos and live streams, are cutting back on the amount of content they create themselves. While Snapchatters are all pretty much limited to the same tools and goofy filters, Facebook creators are up against the pros, and who wants to show off their new Chewbacca mask when the videos before and after have five-figure production budgets.So what’s the obvious solution to both these problems? Start a separate feed for publishers where they can post news stories and videos.This new News Feed will be where users go for professionally produced content. There are already numerous studies showing that social media (Facebook in particular) is the go-to news source for Millennials, so why not just make it official?There would be numerous benefits to this set up for everyone involved.Facebook would benefit by dint of receiving increased traffic and additional ad revenue as users began to visit the new News Feed to catch up on all their news, sports and entertainment content.There’s a tidy sum of money to be made just from the content providers promoting themselves. Every medium, from movies to TV shows to sports teams to musical acts needs to drive viewership and the new Facebook News Feed would be an ideal venue for those promotions, as users were already there looking for similar type of content and so the branded dark posts would feel more like native advertising.Users would benefit because they’d have a place to go on Facebook when they were in the mood to see professional content—the feed would serve up a combination of news, entertainment or sports—and another place to go—call it the “Me Feed” when they wanted to see family photos or updates from friends. This would make Facebook far more valuable to most users, who don’t put “read article about possible vice presidential nominees” and “watch video from Aunt Helen’s vacation” into the same mental bucket.The two would not need to be mutually exclusive, either. People could still share and comment on news stories in their personal feeds. But the separation between the two—and the creation of a personalized, algorithm-driven news feed would make for a very different, and in our opinion, far superior, experience.Users who wanted to try and create their own content would feel less pressure as well, as their videos would be next to other user-generated videos. They’d be able to build an audience and create the same type of YouTube-esque content without feeling that they were competing with CNN and NBC.Publishers would benefit as well, as they’d see more traffic for their stories and have a better understanding of why someone clicked on a particular story. In the past that reason may have been the user was tired of looking at Cousin Betty’s baby photos. But now, publishers would be able to trace a path from story to story and understand what other stories or videos their readers engaged with.Will Facebook actually institute a separate stream for publishers? We kind of doubt it, as Facebook tends to do what it thinks is good for Facebook and everyone else—users and publishers and brands—be damned.This time however, we hold out a glimmer of hope, because as we demonstrated, a separate professionally produced content feed is a very good idea for Facebook, and ofr their bottom line as well.
