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Facebook Tests Removing Publishers From News Feed -- Unless They Pay (mashable.com)
According to a report via Mashable, Facebook is removing posts from Pages in the original News Feed and relegating them to another feed, forcing users to "pay to play" in order to have their content back in the News Feed. The setting is only available in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cambodia for now, but it could be rolled out to other countries later. From the report: The social network last week officially launched its secondary news feed called Explore. The feed generally features posts from Facebook Pages users don't follow. News Feed, meanwhile, hosts posts from friends and Pages users do follow. But that's not true for everyone. In six markets, Facebook has removed posts from Pages in the original News Feed and relegated them to another feed, Filip Struharik, editor and social media manager at Dennik N, wrote. That means Facebook's main feed is no longer a free playing field for publishers. Instead, it's a battlefield of "pay to play," where publishers have to pony up the dough to get back into the News Feed. It's a stark change from how media outlets have grown with Facebook. Publishers like BuzzFeed's Tasty and NowThis grew via distributing viral posts and videos on News Feed, as Ziad Ramley, former social lead at Al Jazeera English, wrote. While companies had to employ social media managers, they could generally rely on them sharing content without paying to boost it.
I nominate this article for the most confusing wording of any Slashdot article this month.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
This doesn't shock me in any way. This is just who they are, and anyone who's dealt with Facebook will totally understand.
I don't trust Facebook to curate my news for me. I use tools to block all Facebook News, so hopefully this just means my ad-blocking tools won't have to work overtime. Seems like a lot of hysteria over nothing.
It's a tiny shift really. Facebook already reduced the number of organic views that you'd get for posts to professional pages by at least an order of magnitude a long time ago.
If you use Facebook as a channel to reach your customers/fans/whatever, the game has been pay-to-play for a long time, and the only thing that matters is still whether or not you get a good return on your investment, just like any other advertising. Watch your numbers, and if Facebook isn't giving you good enough exposure, pull your funding and spend it somewhere else, whether that's Google ads for your business or posters for your local church fair to up in local stores.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That would be fine if FB didn't also hide posts from friends according to some obscure algorithm.