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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.
This has the added bonus of censoring non-mainstream media companies, who won't be able to afford to pay.
This is a mixed bag here. On one hand, this should cut down on the yellow journalism because the outlets that are circulating garbage will go back into the woodwork like cockroaches once daylight breaks. Other other hand, there are some legitimate, non-mainstream news outlets like TYT which could suffer because they might not have the means to pay Facebook's ransom. At the end of the day, none of this has any applicability to me because I told Zuck to go suck a big fat one and deleted my account. Thank you Zuck for 3 wasted years of my life. Boy did it feel good to ditch Facebook .... Fear Of Missing Out is vastly overrated.
It was already pay-to-play. When I would post on my business page, it basically wouldn't show the post to people (even if it was an informational post instead of an ad) unless I paid to "boost this post." It pretty much seemed to treat content and ads as the same thing when posted on a business page. If I did give in and pay to "boost" a post, it would show the post to a bunch of click-happy people who click "like" on everything that shows up on their feeds, presumably in an attempt by FB to make it seem that I was getting value for the money I was wasting. The reality was that very few of those people actually clicked through to the website or watched the video, or whatever the intent of a given post was, they just clicked the like button, and if I looked at their profile (yes, companies can see who "likes" them) it was mostly a bunch of people who like/share everything indiscriminately (the kind of people who quickly get blocked by their FB friends).