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.

Comments

I nominate this article

[I'm New Around Here]

I nominate this article for the most confusing wording of any Slashdot article this month.

Re:I nominate this article

[GrumpySteen]

Blame Facebook. It's their terminology that's confusing things.

The News Feed is just the feed of posts from people you've friended and pages you've followed. Your sister's cat pictures are 'news' in this sense.

A publisher is just a non-personal page that posts articles. It could be a page run by a news publisher or a charity or a community organization. I follow half a dozen small bands who keep in touch with their fans through Facebook.

Some time ago, Facebook decided that following a page from a publisher is no longer enough for you to see all of the posts from that publisher. An algorithm decides who gets to see which posts you get to see what which ones you don't. At the same time, they added the ability for publishers to pay to promote their posts, which prevents the algorithm filtering them out of the feeds of their followers.

That apparently didn't make enough money, so now they're testing the idea of forcing all publishers' articles into a different feed. If you live in one of the countries where they're testing it, you won't see any of the posts on pages you've followed in your news feed unless the publishers pay to get them there.

I don't care

[shellster_dude]

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.

Okay

[DaMattster]

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.

Couldn't give a f**k

[ukoda]

I use social networks to keep up with what is happening in the lives of my friends and family. I do not use it as news network, I do not use it to find out what is happening in the world. I do not use it as commercial network, I do not do business on it. I do not like or join company pages. If someone has to pay to inject their unwanted stuff in my feed I couldn't give a f**k. I never wanted their crap in their in the first place.

To be honest I do wonder why Facebook is still called a social network as the social aspect really seems to be secondary to the commercial aspects of it.

Re:Couldn't give a f**k

[temcat]

That would be fine if FB didn't also hide posts from friends according to some obscure algorithm.

Re:How is this any different?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:I care

[Maxo-Texas]

If you want to keep politics to yourself then

a) Don't play the nation's anthem before the game. It is INHERENTLY POLITICAL to play the national anthem.

b) Don't force the players to be on the field when the anthem plays. This wasn't even an issue until 2009- before that players were in the locker room at that time.

c) Don't force the players to pay homage to a nation that's killing their 7 and 12 year old children, denying them credit, and giving them grossly unequal and unfair police and judicial treatment (most recently shooting an innocent black man with mental issues for running when they stopped him for failing to have a red rear reflector on his bike).

but hey.. I don't watch the NFL to begin with. When Bud Adams fired Bum Phillips, I lost all interest in the game.. over 25 years ago.