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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.
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.