During our annual Crowdynews gathering in February, we were joined by several industry experts who shared their knowledge with our global team. Amir Malik, Programmatic Digital Director at Trinity Mirror, which recently acquired Malik’s previous employer Local World, was one of them. He touched on something interesting I would like to address in this blog: controlling the internet.
“Who controls the internet?” Malik asked. The audience shouted: its users, Google, Facebook, the government. All true in a sense, but whoever controls the distribution of content controls the internet, Malik explained. “Historically this has been Google as the most used search engine (trusted even more than traditional news media), but this is changing. They still have the lion’s share of control, but content distribution is multi-faceted these days, and social media has become more important. These platforms are now the way that news is digested.” Let’s zoom in on the role of social media.
Massive changes
“Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything,” Emily Bell said recently in a speech at Cambridge University about the power big technology companies possess. Bell is Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and a professor at Cambridge. “Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing massive changes in control, finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem in the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many.”
People spend a great deal of their time on social media: a third of time spent online is spent on social media, the latest research from Global Web Index shows. Social has also become the primary source referring back to news articles. And it’s Facebook, the biggest social network in the world, which controls the majority of this traffic. Lately this paradigm is shifting to messaging platforms, such as Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and others. But the traditional social media platforms are still more important than ever before.
Eating the world
Simultaneously, these platforms are trying to become the distributors of news content themselves. Most publishers have been linking to their articles from Facebook for a while and as such have become very dependent on the platform. And while news publishers struggle with controlling their distribution as a result, they give away more of their independence by hosting their articles directly on Facebook.
Posting articles to distribution platforms is said to give publishers three or four times the traffic they currently get. Bell illustrates a temptation to get “all in” on distributed platforms that’s getting stronger for publishers. Malik touches on this as well. Some publishers see social media as their ‘frenemy’ – friend and enemy at the same time, he explains. They need each other, at least for the short term because they don’t want to lose their audiences – an uneasy alliance. As news publishing is still primarily revenue driven, your audience is what brings in money at the end. The publishers rationale is simple: if that audience doesn’t come to us directly, we need to go to them.
Losing control
But, Bell warns in her speech, while putting everything on distributed platforms may seem like a tempting strategy it could lead to publishers losing control over their relationship with readers and viewers, and potentially their revenue. Moreover, because these platforms – often referred to as ‘walled gardens’ – control the distribution they also decide what people will see. Facebook, for instance, regularly changes its news feed algorithm. Earlier this month it decided to push live video over other content, for example. Even Twitter, whose power is real-time and excels in breaking news, has recently started using an algorithm, though not as sophisticated as Facebook, to surface important tweets users may have missed from people they follow. Publishers are starting to realize this, too. But they can’t do much about it or risk losing their audiences.
Bell pleads for a more serious debate and even regulation to ensure transparency in how public speech and expression get treated. “This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy.” The companies who built these platforms didn’t do so with the intent to take over the responsibilities of a free press, she argues. While she may have a point here, it could be argued that some governments pose a far greater threat to a free press compared to algorithms. For instance Turkey, which is known to impose media bans and blocking access to Twitter and Facebook, such as after the explosion in the country’s capital on March 13, about two weeks ago.
Horrible Ankara bombing is no reason for Turkish government to ban Twitter and Facebook. https://t.co/oDBZ66JeQz pic.twitter.com/I3Y6s1Ri3V
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 13, 2016
While social distribution isn’t going away anytime soon, publishers are looking for alternatives to regain control over that relationship with their audiences. Email, for example, is still an important distributor of content. While many believe it should die, it actually has made a comeback for some news publishers. Most of them experiment with email newsletters with great success. It’s a very direct way of communicating with your audience and because you not only know who the reader is, but you can also provide a more tailored experience and form a relationship. Interestingly, Facebook recently started allowing publishers to experiment with direct newsletter signups within Instant Articles. Are we seeing the first cracks in its walled garden?
At Crowdynews, we help publishers leverage the power of social media directly on their own properties, alongside their own articles. Here you can form new relationships with your audience and get to understand their needs in order to stay relevant.
Opening photo credits: Flickr CC / Andrew Heart