Don’t go looking for a slick website to find Vox Media’s newest publication, a gadget-news source called Circuit Breaker: Vox is taking it to your Facebook news feed.
Although Circuit Breaker content will show up Vox’s flagship tech publication The Verge, and it will be tweeted out with links from a new Twitter account, the company is guiding Circuit Breaker’s editorial strategies on what plays best with Facebook, the world’s biggest social network by users.
Why? That is where readers have already moved, and the new publication is giving up some control over its own fate to reach them.
Facebook “is where the people are,” said Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of Vox’s The Verge, in an interview with TheWrap Monday.
“Everyone reads news on their phones, but it’s basically impossible to get an app on the home screen of a phone,” he said. “The Verge is the last of the great webpage audiences.”
So Circuit Breaker is targeting the one app on more home screens than any other. ComScore consistently ranks Facebook as the furthest-reaching smartphone app, reaching more than three-quarters of U.S. mobile media users 18-years-old and up.
Going after those readers means Vox must cede some control over how its reaches them — and give up a slice of advertising revenue.
The move highlights a fundamental predicament in the online news industry, where publishers increasingly find themselves catering to how tech giants prioritize their content. A news site’s traffic can plunge or soar based on a simple tweak to Google’s search algorithm, for example. But companies like Google and Facebook dwarf publishers in scale, and their underlying mission, whatever it individually may be, isn’t ensuring publishers thrive.
Facebook and its news feed algorithm decide what content you see at the top of your feed, and what stays invisible. So Circuit Breaker is catering to types of content it knows Facebook elevates.
For example, every article will be published on Facebook Instant Articles, a program that makes stories sleeker and quicker to load by publishing them directly to Facebook feeds rather than through links back to a media company’s own website.
However, Instant Articles require publishers to share ad revenue, reportedly 30 percent of it, if the media company outsources filling its ad space to Facebook’s “Audience Network” system. Vox has said previously that it splits its strategy between its own ad team selling its Instant Articles inventory, and passing the rest to Facebook to handle.
After early hiccups with Instant Articles, publishers have reported that Facebook has made changes that make it easier to make money there.
But Circuit Breaker will also focus on broadcasting live videos, a recent obsession for Facebook. Last month, the social-media company said it would be lifting more live clips to the top of visitors’ feeds as they’re being broadcast.
Facebook Live don’t have ads. Facebook is exploring ways that live clips can be monetized, but until then, Vox and Circuit Breaker will be investing in a type of content that won’t make it any money — with little public indication of when monetization will come.
In a statement, Vox said it would continue to work with Facebook around advertising opportunities on Instant Articles, especially given a newly relaxed policy allowing product placement or “sponsored content” posts.
Patel said that he disagreed that publishing through Facebook was giving away control.
“The idea is to build a brand that is so powerful we get a measure of control right back,” he said.