by Jim Naureckas
Back in May, Facebook introduced its Promoted Posts program, giving groups and companies with pages on the social media site the option of paying to get their posts seen by more of their fans.
The way Facebook works is that you don't see every post by every friend or every page that you like–Facebook has a formula called Edgerank that tries to determine how interested you'd be in that post, based mainly on how much you've "liked," shared or commented upon similar posts in the past, and how many people are liking, sharing and commenting on that particular post.
At least, that's how it used to work. Now it's got the additional factor of whether Facebook has received a bribe to show you a post that its formula tells it you won't necessarily find to be that interesting.
Now, say your mail carrier lets it be known that they'll accept a small fee to make sure that your mail doesn't get lost–and you decline to pay the fee. What do you expect is going to happen? That's right, more of your mail is going to get lost.
And sure enough, on September 20, Facebook decided to start losing more of your mail.
As reported by the marketing blog Social@Ogilvy (9/25/12), Facebook changed is algorithm for what they call "brand pages" in order to "to minimize brand page posts being seen by those who have opted in to 'liking' that page." Ostensibly, the point of this was "to de-clutter the amount of posts served up to mobile and tablet users by brands." But as Social@Ogilvy pointed out:
The change comes at a time when Facebook is trying to maximize the amount of paid advertising it has on the platform, in an effort to bump its share price after a struggling stock share post-IPO.
The blog of a company that tracks Facebook hits, Edgerank Checker (10/1/12), did a survey of 3,000 brand pages and found that the number of users they reached in the week after September 20 dropped by 36.5 percent–from 26 percent of their fans to 19.5 percent–compared to the week before September 20.
Looking at the stats for FAIR's own Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fairness-Accuracy-In-Reporting/12641323331), the drop is obvious–and even more precipitous than Edgerank Checker's average. In the week of September 14-20, we reached 14,927 people through Facebook; in the week from September 21-27, it was 4,992. That's a drop of 67 percent.
The change in Edgerank illustrates the double-edged sword of social media. On the one hand, such outlets have the potential to vastly increase the ability of individuals to choose what information interests them, to influence what their friends and the general public are seeing, and to discuss and debate the media they receive in real time. On the other, when these activities are all taking place in a privatized communication network, all these choices can be manipulated to serve the profit needs (or political agenda) of the network's corporate owner.
Today it's messages from groups that are being blocked by Facebook in order to extract more money. But don't think the company is going to stop there: "We are expanding a test that started last May that enables people to pay to promote a status update so that more friends may see it in their news feed," Facebook announced in a statement (WebProNews, 9/19/12). "This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends."
In other words–look for Facebook to soon be losing even more of your mail.
© 2012 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/10/02/facebook-is-losing-your-mail-in-hope...
Jim Naureckas is editor of EXTRA! Magazine at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). He is the co-author of Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website.
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Facebook's New Business Plan: From Utility to Monopoly
In the wake of its IPO debacle, expect Facebook to leverage its market dominance aggressively – with its billion users hostage
by Dan Gillmor
The tweet, posted a little over two years ago by someone with deep connections in the internet world, was illuminating. It said, simply:
"A friend working for Facebook: 'we're like electricity.'"
I recalled that tweet last week when Facebook made two announcements of note. First, as everyone knows by now, it has a billion users – including, I suspect, nearly everyone I know. I scarcely use the social network myself, but I am constantly invited to look at items that others post there – and which are unavailable unless I log in. It is getting more and more difficult to avoid Facebook in daily life, and if Facebook gets its wish, it will be an outright necessity.
The second announcement was relatively minor in the bigger scheme of things – Facebook's plan to charge a fee, rumored to be $7, for users who want to place a post high in their followers' news feeds. Wall Street saw the fee as yet another way Facebook might generate revenues – an ever-stronger mandate from shareholders and the financial community in the wake of the company's fumbled IPO.
Both moves spoke to the growing influence of this still-young company, and to its genuine potential to become what amounts to a public utility. It's not as essential as electricity yet, but that goal is not as far out of reach as you might think.
Facebook's ever-expanding user base is easy to understand. It's the ultimate (so far) positive feedback loop – the network effect run wild. The service does offer value to its users, after all: convenience and connections. Sorry to say, most people value their privacy so little these days that they shrug off just about every new abuse of their personal data because the convenience and connections are worth it. Even people and companies that are deeply suspicious of Facebook's motives – with ample reasons for their suspicions – now feel obliged to use the service anyway, compounding Facebook's authority by posting items there and nowhere else. For people like me, who try to avoid using it, this increasingly means either signing in or not seeing things I'd like to see.
One of Facebook's most audacious initiatives has been in the developing world. As featured in an in-depth piece in the Atlantic magazine's new Quartz business news site, Facebook is subsidizing mobile phone data service, making it "free" for users – but with a catch: for all practical purposes, Facebook then becomes their entry into the internet. The company has made no secret of its desire to become what amounts to an alternative internet, and this is a brilliant – if disturbing – way to make that a fait accompli in a number of places where mobile data services are much more important and ubiquitous than what happens on desktop and laptop personal computers. In such places, Facebook will be wedded to national information networks and the governments that control them.
Electricity? Not exactly. But close enough.
Facebook's goal is not just to connect people with each other, but also to be the ubiquitous entry point for those connections. It wants to become what amounts to a public utility. The more Facebook makes itself an essential part of our lives – or, more accurately, the more we make it so – the easier it will be for the company to start charging us for using it. Users have been the product until now; advertisers buy access to us and our personal data. But the $7 fee, which is surely aimed more at businesses than average users, is a way of ensuring that messages get seen.
Only Facebook (and maybe Twitter) could even attempt to do this kind of thing, because it owns the user experience so completely. In its best walled-garden days, AOL couldn't have pulled this off with email, because even then, it didn't have Facebook's kind of dominance.
Market dominance always leads to distortions. Competition is always the preferred cure. But we have other methods, too, and it's not too soon to be contemplating them. We have antitrust laws designed to curb abuses, and we regulate public utilities because we can't trust them not to abuse their positions.
Will policy-makers awaken anytime soon? They'd better.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/facebook-business-pl...
Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, a project of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and is the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, and Mediactive.
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