Facebook’s decision to alter its News Feed algorithm this week to rely more heavily on updates from users’ friends and family than those of publishers will have an impact on a variety of industries and individuals.
Digiday called the change “bad news for publishers that have been increasingly building their audience development strategy around Facebook, some getting upwards of three-fourths of their traffic from it.”
According to the authority on digital media, the winners of Facebook’s decision are “shareable content,” “video” and “directly updated content.” Digiday listed “mid-sized publishers” and “news” as losers.
“If you’re small and dependent heavily on Facebook, it’s over,” founder and CEO of Skift Rafat Ali told Digiday.”But if you’re small like a lot of vertical publishers are and Facebook is a small part of your audience, like for us at Skift, where it is inconsequential, we couldn’t give a s–t.”
Facebook product management VP Adam Mosseri admits News Feed now offers, “far too much information for any one person to consume.” In an effort to solve that problem, the company says it relies on a set of core values to determine its news judgment.
The News Feed values, released publicly for the first time on Wednesday, are as follows: “Friends and family come first,” “a platform for all ideas,” “authentic communication,” “you control your experience” and “constant iteration.”
For those struggling to understand how the new policy may affect them, NewsWhip released a handy “publisher’s guide” to the Facebook changes.
“It’s important to note that this announcement does not signal anything like a wholesale depreciation of news content on Facebook,” the guide states. “Strong stories that interesting, original and well-packaged resonate like few other posts on social media and it’s hard to see that changing in the short term.”