Obama Effect: ABC News Claims 1M Downloads Of Facebook App
ABC rang in huge Nielsen numbers for its ABC News/Facebook debates Saturday night. But we're more interested in the fact that ABC is claiming that more than a million Facebook users have downloaded ABC News' U.S. Politics application.
Context & Ripple Effects
The partnership behind these numbers was set up in November 2007, when ABC News and Facebook announced a joint effort to bring viewers closer to its political coverage. Saturday's debates delivered the payoff on both sides of the ledger: strong Nielsen ratings for the broadcast itself, and — per ABC's own claim — more than a million installs of its U.S. Politics application.
The download figure lands at an awkward moment for Facebook's platform posture. Within the past week it banned Robert Scoble for scripting friends' email addresses out of the service and disabled another account for Terms-of-Use violations, while a malicious widget pushing Zango adware circulated on the same platform now hosting a flagship news brand.
First-order effects
- ABC gets a distribution channel for election coverage that reaches users where they already are, converting debate-night attention into a persistent app install rather than a one-time broadcast audience.
- Facebook gains a marquee media partner during primary season, using ABC's presence to argue the platform is a legitimate venue for mainstream journalism even as it polices third-party data access.
Second-order effects
- Rival broadcasters face pressure to build their own Facebook applications ahead of later primaries, since ABC has claimed first-mover scale with a seven-figure install base.
- Facebook's simultaneous crackdown on scrapers like Scoble sharpens a double standard competitors and developers will press on: partners get deep integration, everyone else gets enforcement.
Third-order effects
- If election-cycle apps keep outperforming network destinations, news organizations will treat social platforms as primary distribution endpoints rather than referral sources — ceding audience data and presentation control to the host.
- The gap between privileged partners and restricted developers points toward tiered platform access becoming the norm, with formal partner programs replacing the open API ideal Facebook launched with.
The trend: Television networks are moving election coverage onto social-network applications, making platforms like Facebook the front door to political news rather than the networks' own sites.