Some Facebook ex-staffers think Twitter-inspired 2013 shift to display more news was a failed experiment, as time spent on FB has declined the past two years
This report closes a loop that opened when Facebook began tilting the News Feed toward news in 2013 — a Twitter-inspired bet that made publishers dependent on Feed distribution. The intervening coverage shows the bet fraying at every stage: contractors described an ill-managed Trending Topics group run on personal news judgment, and a 2017 test moving non-promoted Page posts out of the main Feed cut engagement for some media so sharply that Facebook ended the Explore Feed experiment within months.
Now ex-staffers are framing the original 2013 pivot itself as the failed experiment, with time spent on the platform declining for two straight years. The later Facebook News launch saw publishers report little impact six months in — evidence that the news-for-engagement trade never paid back either side.
First-order effects
Publishers whose traffic models were built on News Feed distribution face a shrinking channel as Facebook weighs rolling back news prominence while overall time spent declines.
Second-order effects
With the Explore Feed test already abandoned after it depressed media engagement, Facebook has less room to demote news without accelerating the audience loss that prompted this reassessment — pushing publishers to treat any Feed real estate as temporary.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — news added in 2013, curated badly by 2016, quarantined by 2018, and commercially negligible by 2020 — platform news distribution settles into a structural retreat, with publishers forced to build audiences off-platform rather than rent them from a Feed.
The trend: Social platforms are unwinding the decade-long assumption that news content drives engagement, leaving publishers to fund journalism without subsidized distribution.
Internally, the News Feed changes seem to be viewed as a return to core mission. Some former senior FB employees see it differently: http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/...
This shift isn't about false news - it doesn't help or hurt our work to reduce its spread. And though focusing on interacrions between people will meaningfully change the experience, news on Facebook isn't going away, and neither are our responsibilities.
Threading the needle through stand-alone/unique innovation and growing existing biz/product is what this, dilemma, is all about. The neat thing is that current companies have all grown up having read the book. So new solutions will be tried.
Facebook Couldn't Handle News. Maybe It Never Wanted To. https://www.buzzfeed.com/... via @cwarzel Just as everything eventually became a word processor, or email, browser, or photos, it is difficult to avoid a successful company or product attempting to absorb more new categori…
“the company's retreat feels less like a selfless act than an abdication of a civic responsibility that Facebook perhaps never truly wanted.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
With Facebook re-weighting the newsfeed again, with revisiting my post from the autumn on how very limited its freedom of action really is here. http://www.ben-evans.com/...
The story lays out a good explanation of why this all is less about addressing “fake news” and more about Facebook protecting its business for other reasons. Read it: http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Of course, press is already done digging about important Facebook announcement because Facebook timed for a Friday, holiday weekend press cycle. AGAIN. https://twitter.com/...
hands down @cwarzel has best report on Facebook's move. Fact employees don't care is (like search) it's the boring cash cow and not the moonshot. Eventually advertisers are going to turn on UGC/messaging though. h/t @mattmittenthal @BuzzFeedBen http://www.buzzfeed.com/...?amp=1 h…
As publishers were having night sweats over News Feed changes, internally FB employees were more interested in whether the company would get into cryptocurrencies http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/...
“an unprecedented acknowledgment that Facebook's core feature — News Feed — has not worked out at all the way it was intended”—@cwarzel http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
In @cwarzel's explaining of Facebook's shift, here's a former employee: “Facebook has research showing that if the percentage of friend/family content gets too low then people don't find Facebook valuable anymore.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Facebook's big news feed change is a tacit admission that its great news experiment — which made it one of the most successful publishers in the world — failed. http://www.buzzfeed.com/...