How Media Will Relate to Facebook in the Future
All media will be personalized in three to five years, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said in September. One of the ways that's likely to happen everywhere just appeared on the UK Independent. — The site announced last night that it now offers granular subscriptions by Facebook.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the next step of a play Facebook has been running since its 2007 ad-targeting plan: turn the social graph into the identity layer for everything on the web. COO Sheryl Sandberg framed the endgame in September, saying all media would be personalized within three to five years, and the UK Independent's new granular Facebook subscriptions are an early publisher-side test of exactly that thesis.
The move lands while Facebook is flush with capital — Goldman Sachs clients just bought $1.5 billion of stock at a $50 billion valuation, and Wedbush analyst Lou Kerner argues it would fetch closer to $100 billion on public markets. An IPO is rumored for next year but remains unconfirmed, which gives the company every incentive to show publishers a concrete product story beyond ads.
First-order effects
- The UK Independent gains a subscription mechanism tied to Facebook identities rather than its own registration system, putting its reader relationships partly on Facebook's infrastructure.
- Facebook gets live evidence for Sandberg's personalization prediction from a national newspaper — a proof point it can shop to other publishers.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers must now choose between building their own granular personalization stacks or ceding reader-signup data to Facebook, with the Independent's results as their benchmark.
- Advertisers gain another reason to buy into Facebook's graph: subscriptions built on it deepen the profile data behind the targeting model first sketched in 2007.
Third-order effects
- If more publishers follow, news distribution structurally shifts from site-owned accounts toward a single platform-mediated login, concentrating both audience identity and the inference drawn from reading behavior in one company's hands.
- That concentration sets up the regulatory question that follows any default identity layer: how much reader data one private intermediary may hold across the industry.
The trend: News publishing is moving from owned logins toward platform-mediated personalization, with Facebook positioning its social graph as the identity layer media runs on.