“Our volume of traffic right now is possible only because Facebook has been very generous about linking to our content,” he said. “I’m aware that they might not be so generous forever.”
Next in line. Many folks have relied on FB traffic only to be crushed beneath the mighty hand of an algorithm change. We've seen it a million times with Google demolishing a site's traffic overnight with an algo update, and now we're seeing it with Facebook as well. None of these traffic sources like to be gamed and will eventually catch up and "fix" the problem.
I have no problem with someone getting paid by capitalizing on third party traffic sources (in this case social) but it's a fool's errand to assume this is going to be sustainable once the distributor decides they want a piece of the pie.
This is particularly relevant given that Facebook announced recently that starting in January they were going to force businesses relying on earned social traffic to pay to reach those same people. They had already been tightening the screws on organic traffic for a while now, and will finally be shutting it off for any sort of promotional or low-quality content post.
I'm really curious to see what that does to publishing businesses like this that don't promote "businessey" things like "SALE SALE SALE!" or product-specific stuff.
Ultimately, I'm guessing many of these companies will pay the ransom as long as it is profitable, and make their best effort to get people into a channel they control that has fixed pricing (like email). Guessing they will likely start shifting to other social networks as well.
I run a movie blog and have seen MASSIVE dropoffs in referrals/engagement on FB - As it's just me running the site, and my time is zero sum, I have shifted far more of my focus on email newsletter marketing as it drives far better traffic. I tried paying to promote a few posts but the ROI was definitely not there relative to ad revenue.
I have heard from countless other publishers I know who are doing many similar things as to not get trapped in the FB ecosystem.
This can be compounded by the fact that a lot of pages that have a % of fans that are from "Like farms" have no easy way to filter those out. So now those companies are paying to reach a garbage-quality audience with an incredibly poor signal to noise ratio.
>Many folks have relied on FB traffic only to be crushed beneath the mighty hand of an algorithm change.
I was thinking the same thing. What could they possibly pivot to should Facebook kick them out without having to fire all of their staff? The long tail of clickbait clicking sounds like an unattractive proposition.
The key is to build a user base from whatever easy/free traffic source exists at the time you need to do it. May be it was Google may be Facebook, or even the App store (just wait for the big paid promo squeeze on that one.)
We've had it easy for a decade. User growth from people who just weren't online before. Ad revenue growth from dollars that fled traditional media. When those growth engines end, and easy/free traffic engines slow down, the content business is going to be fucking painful. To some extent, it already is.
Next in line. Many folks have relied on FB traffic only to be crushed beneath the mighty hand of an algorithm change. We've seen it a million times with Google demolishing a site's traffic overnight with an algo update, and now we're seeing it with Facebook as well. None of these traffic sources like to be gamed and will eventually catch up and "fix" the problem.
I have no problem with someone getting paid by capitalizing on third party traffic sources (in this case social) but it's a fool's errand to assume this is going to be sustainable once the distributor decides they want a piece of the pie.