In the aftermath of the brutal killings of a dozen staff members at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo last week, rallies in support of free speech sprang up across Europe and elsewhere, most featuring the slogan “Je Suis Charlie.” Among those who spoke out against the terrorists and championed the cause of free speech was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — but as some users have pointed out, his company’s policies often don’t live up to that commitment.
The Facebook co-founder posted a long statement on Friday, in which he talked about being the subject of a death threat from an Islamic extremist in Pakistan several years ago, because the social network wouldn’t ban material that depicted the prophet Mohammed in a way that offended him. But Zuckerberg said he didn’t back down, and added that he remains committed to the ideal of free speech even in the face of such threats of violence:
“We stood up for this because different voices — even if they’re sometimes offensive — can make the world a better and more interesting place. Facebook has always been a place where people across the world share their views and ideas. We follow the laws in each country, but we never let one country or group of people dictate what people can share across the world.”
Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists but the archive of old posts has been removed
The week or so between Christmas and New Year’s is always a slow period, even on social networks like Twitter, but one article made my feed light up despite the slowdown, at least for the media folks that I follow: namely, a piece in the New Yorker about Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old entrepreneur the magazine refers to as the “King of Clickbait.” For most of my Twitter stream, the reaction to this piece was a combination of horror, disgust and resignation.
As depressing as the profile might be for those interested in “serious” journalism, however, I think it should be mandatory reading in all newsrooms, both traditional and digital. You may not like his work, but Spartz is learning everything he can about how content works online — which is more than I can say for plenty of other outlets. And the less we all know about that subject, the more likely it is that Spartz and his ilk will win.
By now, many media-watchers have grown accustomed to reading about viral content or “clickbait” specialists like Upworthy or BuzzFeed — which founder Jonah Peretti started as a kind of laboratory to test his theories about how and why content gets shared. People are pretty familiar with “attention gap” headlines and other tricks of the trade used by such outlets to drive huge amounts of traffic. But Emerson Spartz and his network of click factories make most of these sites look like the New York Times by comparison.
Spartz started at 12
I confess that I had never heard of Spartz before, nor most of his websites, and I expect I am not alone, even among those who follow the online media industry. His company is simply called Spartz Inc., and the names of the websites he runs are continually changing — and in any case their actual names or brands are almost irrelevant, as the New Yorker piece points out. All that matters is traffic, the vast majority of which (not surprisingly) comes from Facebook:
“The company operates thirty sites, which have no unifying aesthetic. Their home pages, which can be chaotic and full of old links, don’t always feature a Spartz logo; traffic is generated almost entirely through Facebook, so brand recognition is relatively unimportant. Most of the company’s innovations concern not the content itself but how it is promoted and packaged.”
Figuring out how content works online is something Spartz has been doing since he was a child: at the age of 12, he built and ran what became one of the largest and most popular sites devoted to Harry Potter, called MuggleNet. He used the funds from that to start a series of other sites — devoted to online memes, or inspirational content, or amazing facts. The main site in the Spartz stable right now is a site called Dose.com, formerly known as Brainwreck.
Put together, the sites run by Spartz and his team — which consists of about 35 people based in Chicago — are generating more than 60 million pageviews a month, with Dose.com accounting for about half that. By way of comparison, the Gawker Media empire of blogs like Gizmodo, Jezebel and Deadspin generates about 500 million pageviews in an average month and founder Nick Denton estimates the company is worth about $200 million. Emerson Spartz raised $8 million in venture financing last year, the New Yorker piece says, and made several million more in advertising revenue.
The fact that Spartz is building a company by trying to engineer viral content similar to BuzzFeed didn’t come as a surprise to anyone — but many in the traditional media industry did seem shocked by Spartz’s somewhat cavalier attitude towards crediting the sources of the content he uses (something BuzzFeed has also been criticized for). It’s almost as though he doesn’t see the actual source of the content as having any value at all:
“If you want to build a successful virus, you can start by trying to engineer the DNA from scratch — or, much more efficient, you take a virus that you already know is potent, mutate it a tiny bit, and expose it to a new cluster of people… more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.”
Providing either no credit or very little credit (usually by way of a “hat tip” link near the bottom) is arguably unethical, most of the media types in my stream pointed out. But the reality is that many readers don’t care where a piece of content came from, or even if it’s true or not — regardless of whether you think they should. I’m not saying that’s right, I’m simply pointing out that it’s a fact, one that people like Emerson Spartz will always use to their advantage.
The other thing that seemed to horrify many of the media people I follow was the fact that Spartz is not particularly interested in objective measures of quality — the only factor that determines whether his content matters is whether people share it or not. As he puts it in the New Yorker piece: “The way we view the world, the ultimate barometer of quality is: if it gets shared, it’s quality.”
What do readers want?
Journalists and publishers, of course, prefer to define quality in terms of the industry awards that their content wins, or the attention that it gets from a specific audience. But in a very real sense, Spartz is right — you can produce the best content you want, but if it doesn’t reach readers, then on some level it has failed. And how does it reach readers? That’s the part we all need to understand, and currently people like Jonah Peretti and Emerson Spartz are doing a better job of it than many traditional media companies.
Does that mean you have to indulge in clickbait? Not at all. But it does mean that you have to pay attention to how your content is (or isn’t) flowing and moving and being shared online, and that means devoting resources to it. BuzzFeed thinks so highly of data around this question that it recently appointed Dao Nguyen, the head of its data team, as publisher. Mashable doesn’t have a front-page editor — its front page is created algorithmically based on what people are reading and what they are sharing.
Media companies are still used to thinking of themselves as being in control of content, and of having some say in how and when it reaches readers, but this is a fiction. What control they used to have over distribution channels is gone — Facebook and Twitter and SnapChat control it now. Content has been freed from its restraints, like a virus escaping from a test tube. We can figure out how it works and what it wants, or we can twiddle our thumbs while others do.
The news that Citigroup now thinks Instagram could be worth as much as $35 billion likely caused some mouths to fall open last week, and the list of those who found themselves agape probably included co-founder Kevin Systrom and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, although for very different reasons. Whether Citigroup has the actual number right or not is impossible to say — but what is clear is that the Instagram acquisition could be one of the smartest things that Facebook has ever done, and one of the best deals of the past decade.
The reason why Kevin Systrom might be shaking his head a little at the valuation is that such a huge number implies he might have sold the company too soon, something that Silicon Valley founders and their financial backers often worry about after the fact. Of course, it’s difficult to say whether Instagram would ever have gotten there if it had remained an independent company and not had Facebook’s marketing power behind it.
As for Dick Costolo, he’s likely remembering when Twitter tried to buy Instagram — and, according to some reports, had a deal ready to go — only to have Mark Zuckerberg swoop in and yank the company out of his grasp with a much higher offer. Now Instagram not only has more users than Twitter (although Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said recently that he doesn’t care about those figures) but it is now worth more too, at least theoretically.
Photo sharing = ads
Getting to $35 billion requires you to do some mental gymnastics of the kind that Wall Street analysts are pretty accustomed to — you take the 300 million users that Instagram says it has, then estimate what each one could generate in terms of advertising revenue, then look at what proportion of Facebook’s overall revenue that represents, then apply the same multiple that Facebook’s stock has and bingo: eventually you get $35 billion.
Om Malik with Instagram founder and CEO Kevin Systrom
So Citigroup analyst Mark May previously argued that Instagram was worth about $19 billion based on this arithmetic, but now he says its almost twice as much. Why? Because he thinks that Instagram’s advertising — with companies like Adidas, GE and Lexus — is going so well that the company could bring in far more revenue than he expected. In fact, he estimates that Instagram’s revenue will be close to $3 billion next year, or about three times what Facebook paid for the company.
Even if you disagree with the $35 billion price tag that Citigroup has come up with, it’s hard not to argue that Mark Zuckerberg got a hell of a deal when he bought Instagram for only $1 billion, even though that sounded like an awful lot of money at the time (of course, that was before Facebook paid an even more mind-boggling $19 billion for WhatsApp). Is it the best deal of the past decade? I think it’s right up there.
Better than YouTube?
It’s not just that Facebook paid $1 billion for something that might now be worth $35 billion, although that is pretty incredible in itself. It’s that by buying Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg was able to tap into something that had the potential to disrupt Facebook in the worst kind of way: a photo-sharing app that not only was growing like a weed, but appealed to younger users — the very same user base that was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Facebook proper.
Facebook’s purchase looks even smarter because of what it did after the acquisition, which is virtually nothing — in other words, it left Instagram alone to function more or less as it had before. I come across younger fans all the time who don’t even know that Facebook owns Instagram, and that’s probably for the best. This is a classic example of Zuckerberg’s willingness to disrupt himself and his business at the drop of a hat, often by spending billions (WhatsApp is another great example).
The only acquisition I can think of that comes close to Facebook’s purchase of Instagram is Google buying YouTube: just as it was in Instagram’s case, most analysts thought the $1.65 billion price tag for the video-sharing site was insane — especially given the potential copyright issues. This year, YouTube is estimated to be worth about $40 billion to Google, which is right in the same ballpark as Instagram, if you believe Citigroup’s numbers. And Google did the same thing with YouTube as Facebook did with Instagram — namely, mostly left it alone. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
In a world of virtual-reality headsets and Google Glass and responsive mobile websites, an email newsletter seems like the most antiquated technology since the buggy whip. It’s just words on a page! And don’t people hate email and want to kill it? They sure do — except when that email contains a list of the most important or interesting or relevant things they need to know, at which point it becomes more valuable than gold. And that alchemy is something worth thinking about.
Evidence of that value appeared again this week, when The Skimm — a newsletter run by two former NBC producers and aimed at a largely female fan base — raised a financing round of $6.5 million from a series of VCs. I saw many skeptical responses to this deal, as though the idea of an email newsletter raising millions was evidence of a gigantic bubble in media funding. But it isn’t, I don’t think.
There’s been a fair bit written recently about the rise of the email newsletter, including a piece from Rebecca Greenfield at Fast Company last year, but Millie Tran of the American Press Institute put her finger on the most important thing in a short item at the Nieman Lab, part of that site’s collection of forecasts for the future of media in 2015. One of the reasons why newsletters work is that they act as a smart filter for people overwhelmed by the stream of real-time news.
Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.
Every month or so, it seems, a media outlet decides to get rid of their comments. The latest is The Week, which follows Reuters and Re/code, both of whom shut down their comments recently. Every outlet that does this says the same thing: conversation has moved to social media, etc. But as New York Times staffer Mat Yarow argues in a post at Medium, this argument is essentially a cop-out. Comments need to be fixed, not killed.
In its post about shutting down comments, The Week says that “in the age of social media, the smartest and most vibrant reader conversations have moved off of news sites and onto Facebook and Twitter.” But even if this is the case — which I’m not disputing — whose fault is that? Most sites have done virtually nothing to try and make their comment sections a more hospitable place for smart and vibrant discussion, so why wouldn’t it go elsewhere?
The Week piece also says that the site has “a deep respect for the intelligence and opinions of our readers.” But not enough respect, apparently, to allow those readers to post their thoughts about its articles on the same page where those articles appear.
Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.
Every month or so, it seems, a media outlet decides to get rid of their comments. The latest is The Week, which follows Reuters and Re/code, both of whom shut down their comments recently. Every outlet that does this says the same thing: conversation has moved to social media, etc. But as New York Times staffer Mat Yurow argues in a post at Medium, this argument is essentially a cop-out. Comments need to be fixed, not killed.
In its post about shutting down comments, The Week says that “in the age of social media, the smartest and most vibrant reader conversations have moved off of news sites and onto Facebook and Twitter.” But even if this is the case — which I’m not disputing — whose fault is that? Most sites have done virtually nothing to try and make their comment sections a more hospitable place for smart and vibrant discussion, so why wouldn’t it go elsewhere?
The Week piece also says that the site has “a deep respect for the intelligence and opinions of our readers.” But not enough respect, apparently, to allow those readers to post their thoughts about its articles on the same page where those articles appear.
Instead, readers are forced to try and track down the writers and editors of the magazine on various social networks and then do their best to find the conversation about whatever article they are interested in, and then convince someone on the staff to engage with them. What many news outlets seem to mean by the discussion “moving to Twitter and Facebook” is that it’s much easier to ignore.
Engagement equals value
Yurow, by contrast — who works on the audience development team at the New York Times, and before that worked for Huffington Post and Bloomberg — believes as I do that handing over a key component of your relationship with readers to Twitter and Facebook is a mistake. Not only does it give up something valuable, but it suggests to readers that their comments and interaction aren’t worth the trouble:
“To simply give up, and hand our most engaged users over to Facebook and Twitter is a major loss to a industry that is in dire need of loyalty. We need to come up with real, sustainable solutions?—?solutions that view community through the lens of modern culture, technology and business. It is imperative that we save comments. We owe it to our readers, we owe it to our writers, and we owe it to ourselves.”
Comments are broken, Yurow argues, because most publications have not put the time or resources into trying to make them work, and so they have become troll and spam-filled backwaters that everyone tries to avoid. But that’s not the fault of readers — it’s the fault of publishers for not seeing their relationship with their readers as being of value. So how can this perception of comments be turned around? Yurow outlines several ways in his post.
For one thing, media sites could look at the actual return on investment that they get from engaging with readers — which is real, and can be measured. It’s easier for sites with subscriptions to do this, since they can track how many commenters eventually “convert” into being subscribers. But it’s not that hard to tie reader time spent with things that matter to your business, whether it’s advertising or something else. As Yurow points out:
“Commenters do (at least) two things most site visitors do not: they explicitly demonstrate interest in your product, and they willingly hand over their email address. In any other business, we’d call these people ‘warm leads.’ In media, we call them trolls.”
Readers deserve our time
The other key point I agree with Yurow on is that many sites are to blame for their own troll-filled comments, because their writers and editors fail to engage even with the intelligent commenters, and so the predictable happens — flame-wars and offensive behavior take over. As blogger Anil Dash pointed out in a post in 2011, if there is bad behavior in your comments then you as the site owner are partially to blame. Yurow notes:
“It is important that some action is taken to remind readers that their voice is being heard. This can come in the form of a featured comment, a short response, or even a strategic email or tweet. Will this completely stop belligerence at the bottom of the page? Absolutely not. But it will help set the expectation of civil discourse and conversation.”
Among other things, Yurow also suggests that publishers try to figure out some way to make comments more relevant for more readers — whether it’s by having editors and writers highlight or point out interesting comments (something Forbes and other sites such as Gigaom already do), or by using algorithms and other tools such as reader votes to surface the best, something the New York Timesitself has experimented with in the past.
In a recent piece for BuzzFeed, writer Charlie Warzel looked at what he calls the “mutation” of citizen journalism, and how this dream of a more democratic media has somehow turned into a vicious form of vigilantism — including incidents like the one in which a right-wing blogger tried to identify the victim in a controversial campus rape incident. But I think in his haste to condemn that kind of activity, Warzel overstates the case against citizen journalism.
There have always been attack-dog style bloggers, especially on the right, and I don’t think this kind of approach is any more virulent than it was five or 10 years ago, although it may get more attention thanks to Twitter. Also, it’s not as though citizen journalism was somehow bastardized and became vigilantism — they are opposite edges of the same sword. We can’t have one without enabling the other, and to the extent that we crack down on one we also cripple its alternative.
Are there examples of when bloggers and other amateur journalists lost their way or went too far in their pursuit of the capital T truth? Of course there are. One of the most infamous occurred after the bombings in Boston, when some members of a Reddit sub-forum tried to identify the alleged bombers and targeted an innocent man. But this kind of over-stepping isn’t confined to amateurs: journalists at Gawker have engaged in what some might call vigilantism by “doxxing” or publicly identifying children who posted racist remarks following Barack Obama’s re-election, or outing anonymous Reddit moderators for offensive behavior.
Both professional and amateur journalists were also involved in identifying a man who posted fake Twitter alerts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Were all of these incidents justified? That’s up to readers to decide for themselves. I happen to think that some or all of them overstepped the bounds of what we consider appropriate investigative behavior — and the right-wing blogger in question has definitely done so — but it is a grey area at best.
Is there a way to legislate or prevent those kinds of incidents without preventing more beneficial reporting by citizen journalists and bloggers? I can’t think of one.
It’s easy to focus on the negative aspects of social media\, but it has also been an incredibly powerful tool for good: Just think of the information that has come out of Egypt or Syria or Ukraine that would never have made it into the public eye, or the work of bloggers like Eliot “Brown Moses” Higgins and his fact-checking of government and anti-government propaganda. Think of what a formerly little-known blogger named Glenn Greenwald was able to accomplish, and how much that has expanded what we know about the security and intelligence establishment in the US and elsewhere.
How do we distinguish between what bloggers like Greenwald or Higgins do, and what bloggers like Chuck Johnson do? I honestly don’t know if there is a way. The same tools that enabled Andy Carvin during the Arab Spring or Brown Moses in Syria or Greenwald’s Snowden scoop can also be used for evil, but does that mean they aren’t valuable, or need to be restricted? No. It just means that most swords come with two sides.
Nothing highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of social media quite like a breaking news event, where rumors and misinterpretations appear alongside official accounts and expert analysis in a giant stew of instant commentary. That’s been the case ever since a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, and it continued on Monday night following news of the decision by a grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
In what even some legal experts said was an unusually combative speech about the decision not to charge Wilson with a crime, St. Louis county prosecutor Robert McCulloch spent a considerable amount of time — before he even got to announcing the decision — criticizing social media and “the 24-hour news cycle” for complicating the Brown case.
That opening statement sounds like, “None of this would be a problem except the Internet.”
According to McCulloch, erroneous witness accounts that were circulated through social media — including some that said Wilson shot Brown in the back while he was standing over him, or that he was killed while he had his hands raised in surrender — made it more difficult for the grand jury to come to a decision, and exacerbated the tension in the community.
A double-edged sword
Is there some truth to the prosecutor’s criticism? Of course there is. Twitter and Facebook inevitably extend the reach of false information and incorrect assumptions, just as they do with true information and correct assumptions. That’s the reality of a world in which anyone can publish their thoughts instantly and potentially reach a large audience, and it has always been a double-edged sword — as incidents like the hunt for the Boston bomber have shown.
If it wasn’t for Twitter, millions may never have learned Michael Brown’s name.
As more than one person has pointed out in response to McCulloch, however, that same ability has also allowed more information about the Ferguson shooting to emerge than would ever have been possible before — including information that the police department and the district attorney’s office might not want circulated, such as eyewitness reports and evidence.
Those same tools have also allowed black residents of Ferguson and plenty of other towns across the United States to talk about what it’s like to lose loved ones in police shootings, or to live in fear of their lives, or to not have their version of events taken seriously because they are the wrong color or because they are not from a police family, as Ferguson prosecutor McCulloch is.
In the early days following the shooting, a number of different versions of the events circulated: some said Brown wasn’t threatening at all, and that Wilson shot without provocation, or that he killed the teenager while he was running away. Autopsy results were released that showed young man had been shot 12 times, including what appeared to be several shots to the head, and that seemed like too many for an incident involving an unarmed man.
According to the testimony and evidence presented to the grand jury, many of these stories have turned out to be untrue — there is no evidence that Brown was shot in the back, and there are injuries and other signs that show he struggled with Wilson while he was in the police car. Some witnesses said he was charging towards the officer when he was shot.
That said, almost all of the evidence and testimony confirms that Brown was shot more than 10 times, and that he was unarmed — and that he was at least 30 feet away and probably more when the final shots were fired and he collapsed in the street and died. In other words, for many the central truth of the case has been proven: Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black teen even though his life didn’t appear to be in imminent danger.
More info is better
In an earlier time, much of the information about the case would only have come to light months or even years later, as a result of leaks from the prosecutor’s office or interviews with eyewitnesses and jurors — if it ever came to light at all. Were things better then? It’s likely that police departments and district attorneys think so, but it’s not clear that this kind of freedom of information (both correct and incorrect) has been a net negative for society.
As it has with so many other events, such as the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt or the more recent demonstrations in Turkey and Ukraine, social media connects us to others who are experiencing things we may know nothing about, and allows us — if we want to — to gather much more information than we would have had before, and to come to our own conclusions about who is right and who is wrong.
That may take effort, but it is more possible than it has ever been. And while it may make it difficult for grand juries or police departments, as the Ferguson prosecutor argued in his speech, in the long run more information is almost always better — especially when it comes from people who are the closest to the situation. What we choose to do with that information once we get it is up to us.
As more and more apps become multibillion-dollar businesses — from WhatsApp and Instagram to SnapChat and Slack — it’s tempting to see them as replacing the web, or taking over from it. This helps explain the periodic outbreak of articles about how “the web is dying,” like the one Christopher Mims wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. But the truth is that, as is often the case when someone says a certain kind of behavior is dying, it’s a lot more complicated than such headlines suggest.
In his piece, Mims repeats many of the same arguments we’ve heard before about how apps have come to dominate our activity as mobile usage has grown. Instead of using web browsers, we go to task-specific apps, and these are in many cases “walled gardens” that benefit a single corporation and don’t play well with others — either in terms of the data they collect or in terms of links to other sites:
”Everything about apps feels like a win for users — they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.”
The “web is dying” meme has been around since at least 2010, when Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a feature entitled The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet, which talked about the rise of apps for services like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and Netflix. It warned about the move from “the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms” and called the web “an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants.”
The web pie is growing
There were a number of problems with the Wired story, however — including the fact that the chart it used contrasted the growth of video traffic with the decline of “web” traffic, even though most of that video traffic was coming from websites and web-based services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix. But the phenomenon it was describing was definitely a real thing, and in fact has only accelerated with the growth of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, which don’t even have traditional websites.
As Zach Seward at Quartz notes, the Mims piece makes a common mistake by implying that the size of the web pie is finite — in other words, that mobile apps are stealing market share or user attention from the open web or the traditional browser, and therefore the web is dying. But the size of the web pie is arguably still growing rapidly, which suggests that apps are stealing attention from other things, including various kinds of offline activity.
Also, a number of people — including tech analyst Ben Thompson — have pointed out that a huge proportion of the time spent with mobile apps is devoted either to games or to various forms of instant messaging. Since neither of those things has ever relied that much on the web (or at least on the desktop browser), they aren’t really a conclusive sign that the web is being killed off by apps. As Thompson put it in a guest post at WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog earlier this year:
”The more interesting juxtaposition raised by Flurry’s numbers is not apps versus web, but games and social versus everything else. YouTube and other entertainment apps form a solid percentage of what is left (8%), but the remainder is a mishmash of utilities, productivity, the aforementioned news, and, of course the web.”
But one of the biggest flaws with the “web is dying” argument is that it assumes that apps themselves don’t drive more traffic to the open web — which they clearly do. Social-networking apps like Twitter and Facebook in particular, which consume a huge proportion of the mobile app time of many users, are at least in part about sharing links to content, and while many of these apps open links in their own in-app browsers, that still counts as web traffic.
The rise of silos
One of the concerns that Mims mentions, which Wired also hinted at in its cover story, is that the rise of apps is dangerous because they are “walled gardens” both in design and philosophy, and therefore they are a potential threat to the open web. The web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee raised similar concerns in a piece he wrote for Scientific American in 2010, in which he described the web as being “critical to free speech” and a civil society.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that Lee’s criticisms — which are very valid — weren’t about apps per se, but about the desire on the part of companies like Apple and Facebook to control both the experience on their platforms and access to the data that they collect from users. This isn’t something specific to apps: Facebook behaves exactly the same way on its website. The app is just another way of accomplishing the same goal.
As I tried to point out in a response to the Wired piece four years ago, apps make sense for certain kinds of behavior, and likely always will — whether it’s games, chat-style discussion, sharing photos, or searching for maps and directions. In many ways, the desktop browser-based web was never really much good for those things anyway. But that doesn’t mean the web is dead, or dying. As Thompson put it:
”There is no question that apps are here to stay, and are a superior interaction model for some uses. But the web is like water: it fills in all the gaps between things like gaming and social with exactly what any one particular user wants.”
I’m certainly not arguing with the idea that the open web needs defending, or that we should be aware of the efforts of large corporations to force increasing amounts of activity and content into their silos — that is definitely an issue with Facebook in particular, and with others. But to blame all of that on apps is short-sighted, I think. Apps are just a symptom.
Earlier this year, I wrote about Ben Thompson — who writes about technology and strategy at a blog called Stratechery — and his decision to launch a membership-based paywall for his one-man operation. At the time, I wondered whether someone without the kind of national following that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber or The Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan have would be able to make such a plan work. As it turns out, the answer to that question is yes.
In a follow-up interviews, Thompson told me that while there were some touch-and-go moments in the early days of his plan, the subscription part of his model has worked out far better than he ever hoped it would. Membership signups and the associated revenue have “vastly exceeded my expectations,” he said.
The Taiwan-based blogger, who previously worked as a product manager for companies like Apple and Microsoft, said that he was hoping to get about 500 members to sign up in the first year, and his most ambitious dream was that he might get a thousand — a goal that was based on veteran technology writer Kevin Kelly’s advice about needing only “a thousand true fans” to survive as an independent artist.
“My realistic goal was 500 in the first year, and my sort of crazy goal was to get a thousand — and I did that in the first six months. I’ve actually gone quite a bit past that now.”
Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.
Earlier this year, I wrote about Ben Thompson — who writes about technology and strategy at a blog called Stratechery — and his decision to launch a membership-based paywall. At the time, I wondered whether someone without the kind of national following that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber or The Daily Dish’s Andrew Sullivan have would be able to make such a plan work. As it turns out, the answer is yes.
In a follow-up interview, Thompson told me that while there were some touch-and-go moments in the early days of his plan, the subscription part of his model has worked out far better than he ever hoped it would. Membership signups and the associated revenue have “vastly exceeded my expectations,” he said.
The Taiwan-based blogger, who previously worked as a product manager for companies like Apple and Microsoft, said that he was hoping to get about 500 members to sign up in the first year, and his most ambitious dream was that he might get a thousand — a goal that was based on veteran technology writer Kevin Kelly’s advice about needing only “a thousand true fans” to survive as an independent artist. ”My realistic goal was 500 in the first year, and my sort of crazy goal was to get a thousand — and I did that in the first six months. I’ve actually gone quite a bit past that now.”
Direct to the reader
Those 1,000-plus members are paying $10 a month or $100 a year for access to what Thompson calls the Daily Update, which is a collection of several posts with his take on or analysis of topical events — such as singer Taylor Swift removing her songs from Spotify and the implications for the music industry, or the future of the Uber car service. Members can access the content online, or via email, or through a private RSS feed.
So Thompson will soon be bringing in over $100,000 from membership-based subscriptions, and has managed to get recommendations from fans like Gruber and Box CEO Aaron Levie along the way. He is now making the vast majority of his living from those memberships (although he also does some consulting on the side). He says he used to have sponsored posts, but they made up too large a proportion of the content — since he only posts a few items a day — and they involved too much administrative work.
Thompson also echoed something that Andrew Sullivan told me about his model at the Daily Dish, which is that he prefers to keep the relationship between himself and his readers as pure as possible — to feel as though he is working directly for them, and pleasing them is all that matters. ”I really like what it does for my incentives — my pay comes from my readers, so my job is to just deliver a kick-ass daily update every day and to write great stuff for the blog. What I like about it is it’s very clear: it feels like people value what I have to say, so what you’re getting if you subscribe is more of what I have to say.”
Since I wrote that initial post, Thompson says he has simplified the model even further, to the point where there is only one level — the $10 a month/$100 a year level. In the beginning, he had three levels of support, including one that gave readers things like a T-shirt, as well as a higher level that cost $30 a month or $300 a year, and included private meetups and the ability to email Thompson directly and get advice or analysis. Those have been dropped.
The internet is good for media
The membership structure now is much simpler (those who had paid $300 were given the option of either a refund or a credit, or to donate the excess to Thompson — about 20 percent chose the latter, he said). But the blogger notes that without those initial members paying $300 for a year, he wouldn’t have had the money in the bank with which to continue, or the confidence that he would be able to survive. “They were like my VC investors in a way,” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without them.”
Thompson said that while he is still making less than he did as a product manager at a tech company, he is making more than enough to live on, since his costs are so low. And that’s one reason he wanted to talk about his success, he said — because it might encourage someone else to try it, and because it might help counter some of the prevailing narrative in the media world about how the internet is going to be the death of newspapers and therefore of serious writing or journalism.
”It’s striking to me how many people in the media only see the internet as a bogeyman, and completely fail to see the potential that it enables — what I’m doing would be totally impossible without the internet. Yes, the world is going to look totally different than it did during the glory years of newspapers, but we have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.”
As Thompson notes, he is not exactly getting rich from his blog, and whether he will still be able to make a living from it a year or two from now is unknown — but it is encouraging to see someone without a built-in national audience succeed with such a strategy, just as it’s encouraging to see people like my friend Jesse Brown succeed at crowdfunding a podcast, or see Contributoria and Beacon having some success with their direct-to-readers model. Let a thousand funding models bloom.
As many users know by now, Facebook routinely experiments with the structure of the newsfeed — that is, which updates its ranking algorithm highlights and which it down-votes or hides completely. Much of this experimentation is innocuous, but some of it has real-world consequences that extend beyond Facebook and into the disturbing realm of social manipulation: in the latest example, Mother Jones reports that the network tweaked the newsfeeds of almost 2 million users in 2012, and this experiment materially affected voter-turnout rates.
As Techpresident founder Micah Sifry describes in the Mother Jones piece, the manipulation occurred as Facebook was developing a feature it calls its “voter megaphone” — that is, a tool that allows users to post a prominent “I’m Voting” button on their profile in order to encourage others to vote.
Experimentation on or manipulation of users through tweaks to the newsfeed is a controversial topic for many, ever since Facebook admitted earlier this year that a team of researchers had modified the newsfeeds of users to change the emotional content of what they saw in order to determine whether good or bad news could trigger a kind of “emotional contagion,” and make them feel a certain way.
Some argued that this was just part of the tweaking that web-based services do all the time, and pointed out that the 700,000 users affected were a tiny portion of the social network’s user base — but others were disturbed by what they saw as emotional manipulation without proper disclosure. And many saw it as another example of the potential flaws in an algorithmically-filtered online environment.
Newsfeed changes boosted voting rates
The Mother Jones story describes how, in the months leading up to election day in 2012, Facebook made a change to the newsfeeds of 1.9 million users in order to see whether it could influence those users to become more interested in political activity: it did this by increasing the number of hard news items that appeared at the top of a user’s newsfeed. According to one of the Facebook data scientists involved, this change “measurably increased voter turnout.”
As described in a public talk given by Facebook data scientist Lada Adamic in 2012 (a video of which has since been removed from YouTube, according to Sifry), Facebook made the change to the feeds of almost 2 million users and then studied their behavior — and found a “statistically significant” increase in the amount of attention they paid to government-related news. The number who voted (or at least those who said they voted) went from 64 percent to 67 percent.
It is curious that Facebook officials apparently thought that testing such a major change in its users’ feeds in the weeks before the 2012 election — precisely when people might be paying more attention to political news and cues — was benign and not worth sharing with its users and the public… and, according to Buckley, the public will not receive full answers until some point in 2015, when academic reports fully describing what Facebook did in 2012 are expected to be published.
Experiment in 2010 also affected turnout
As has been reported before, Facebook also experimented with the newsfeed in the months leading up to the 2010 general elections. It put different versions of the “I’m Voting” button on the pages of about 60 million users — and put them in different places — and then studied the reactions and behavior of users. Two groups of about 600,000 users served as a control group: one saw the button but didn’t get any additional information, and others saw no button at all.
The results of the experiment — which Facebook users were not made aware of — were published in 2012 in Nature magazine, under the title “A 61 Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization.” The authors, including both outside researchers and Facebook data scientists, studied voter records to see whether the changes actually affected voter turnout, and concluded that it did.
According to the study, voter turnout increased by at least 340,000 or about 0.14 percent of the total voting-age population in 2010. Compared to previous changes in turnout, the authors concluded that this was “substantial.” The evidence indicated that “more of the 0.6 percent growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook.”
As Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain wrote in a piece for The New Republic after news of the 2010 experiment emerged, the research raised the possibility that Facebook could actually influence the outcome of certain elections — perhaps even without meaning to do so (Zittrain proposed that large web companies like Facebook be defined as “information fiduciaries,” and have specific duties with regards to the information they collect about their users).
What other behavior is Facebook influencing?
A spokesman for Facebook told Mother Jones the research in 2012 was just part of the ongoing experiments related to improving the quality of the newsfeed for users, and that the company has nothing to hide. He said the company took down the video presentation by its data scientist because it didn’t want to pre-empt the research paper she is writing about the experiment. But despite such explanations, the idea of being experimented on is something many users find disturbing.
As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a recent research paper on the social impact of “big data” involving social behavior, these types of experiments make people uneasy because they are “opaque, powerful and possibly non-consensual, in an environment of information asymmetry.” In other words, they make users feel like they are being experimented on by an unseen and impersonal entity, for purposes that they don’t really understand or in many cases are not even made aware of.
The fact that Facebook can manipulate newsfeed design in ways that can influence voter-turnout rates is fascinating, and perhaps even encouraging — but at the same time, the implications of that are disturbing: what other kinds of behavior could it influence, or actually be influencing even now, without our knowledge?
There was a lot of attention on Twitter on Monday, as the company reported its quarterly financial results: despite meeting Wall Street estimates on things like revenue, the network’s share price slid by almost 10 percent. According to most of the stock experts who commented on the slump, investors were looking for better user growth and engagement numbers — and that dilemma helps explain why Twitter is going to continue to muck around with your timeline using algorithms, regardless of whether users want it to do so.
The first hint that this trend was likely to accelerate came during an interview last month with new chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who said that the traditional reverse-chronological timeline arrangement “isn’t the most relevant for the user.” Although my summary of his thoughts drew plenty of fire from Twitter and its defenders — who argued that I had taken his comments out of context — it seemed clear to me what was coming.
.@mathewi@om he never said a “filtered feed is coming whether you like it or not”. Goodness, what an absurd synthesis of what was said.
In fact, comments made by both CEO Dick Costolo and by Anthony Noto during Monday’s conference call with financial analysts made it clear that these experiments are going to continue, and if anything will be broadened to the point where they will likely impact every user to some extent. If you see tweets that have been favorited or rewteeted by people you don’t follow showing up in your stream out of sync with your timeline, then you will know that you are part of the rollout.
Can Twitter have its cake and eat it too?
The company is doing its best to make it sound like this is not a big deal, and that the reverse-chronological timeline will remain intact. But the reality is that for many users, the ability to curate their own experience on Twitter is a crucial feature — just take a look at the survey we did in September, which was 87-percent negative on the idea of an algorithmically-curated feed. The idea of someone else deciding what’s important in their stream appears to be anathema to many users.
Of course, for Twitter this probably feels like just another enhancement that they think will make the feed better for some — primarily new users and those who don’t log in very much, which is a key market for the kind of future growth Wall Street wants to see. And the stream has already been disturbed by things like promoted tweets and other forms of advertising, which show up out of sync with the timeline. What’s the big deal about one more disruption?
Supporters of Twitter’s move, like early investor Chris Sacca of Lower Case Capital, argue that the changes will make the service more user-friendly, especially for new users, and that existing or power users shouldn’t see it as a threat. But it’s become very clear that some don’t want Twitter to alter their stream via algorithm even if it claims to be doing so for their own good.
The slippery slope of algorithmic filters
The most common response to the idea is that it will make Twitter like Facebook, where an algorithm routinely promotes or down-ranks content based on criteria that users can barely understand — if they even realize that their feed is curated at all (which surveys have shown that many do not). In an impassioned plea to Twitter not to implement a Facebook-style algorithm, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci recently summed up the feelings of many die-hard Twitter users:
[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]The key to this power isn’t the reverse chronology but rather the fact that the network allows humans to exercise free judgment on the worth of content, without strong algorithmic biases. That cumulative, networked freedom is what extends the range of what Twitter can value and surface, and provides some of the best experiences of Twitter.[/blockquote]
Although Facebook’s feed is different in that it actually hides or removes content without telling people, based on whatever signals its algorithm chooses to look at — few of which are publicly disclosed, of course — a number of the company’s fans have pointed out that Twitter is only talking about adding content to your stream via algorithm, such as “important” tweets that you might have missed.
But as more than one person has noted, this is a slippery slope at best: once you have made the decision to alter the flow or the arrangement of tweets based on abstract criteria that have been programmed into an algorithm, then at some point you are going to decide — for the user’s own good — to hide or remove certain things as well, because you want to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
The ironic thing about Twitter is that even though many (including me) complain about the difficulty of plowing through all those tweets and finding the signal, we very much want to be the ones doing the filtering, rather than having it done by a faceless algorithm. The whole point of having a social network in the first place is that the people you choose to follow are the algorithm. Flawed, perhaps, but human, and therefore somehow wonderfully unpredictable.
Encouraging more engagement from new users makes perfect sense for Twitter as a company, and particularly a public one, which has to justify its market value to investors. But the changes that are required in order to do that may not make sense for many of the network’s long-time or power users — and that’s a dilemma the company is going to have to confront sooner rather than later.
The New York Times seems to have finally awoken to the idea that Facebook exerts a growing amount of control over how millions of people get their news, and that it would very much like to increase that control as much as possible — in order to serve the best interests of its users, of course. This is something that I have been writing about for some time now, and it is not going away. If anything, the pressure on media companies to play ball with Facebook is only growing more intense.
As David Carr and Ravi Somaya note in their pieces, the structure of the media business has changed dramatically thanks to the rise of the social web — of which Facebook is by far the largest part. Where media companies used to control the distribution of their content because they owned the printing presses and the trucks, now entities like Facebook control who sees what and when.
In classic internet fashion, this is both a good thing and a bad thing simultaneously: on the one hand, it allows news and other content to reach a far larger audience than it ever would have otherwise, and that’s arguably a positive thing not just for news companies but for society as a whole.
The algorithm is the editor now
The downsides of Facebook’s dominance, however, are legion — including the vacuum that the giant social network has created when it comes to internet advertising, which has sucked a lot of the oxygen out of both the traditional and the online media industry. In addition, the desire to surf the massive wave of attention that Facebook has at its command has arguably led to a rise in clickbait-style content, and in a broader sense has compelled news companies to try and conform to Facebook’s idea of what good or shareable content is.
In comments to the Times, a News Feed engineer says that Facebook doesn’t want to be an editor, it just wants to show people what they are interested in, based on their behavior on the site and their social connections. And technically, this is true. But as Jay Rosen points out in a blog post on the issue, the Facebook algorithm is still an incredibly powerful editorial force, whether Facebook wants to admit it or not. And we don’t know anything about how it operates or why — like Google’s search algorithm, it is essentially a black box.
Because of the role that Facebook plays in people’s lives, the functioning of that algorithm is very much a public policy issue and a media literacy problem — as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued in a piece she wrote for Medium. As I argued in a similar piece, the social network’s influence (or lack of influence) around the events in Ferguson, Mo. earlier this year raises some important questions about the way that algorithms are shaping our world view.
You will be assimilated
David Carr compares Facebook to a large dog, but a better comparison might be the Borg, the race of cyborgs that constantly strove to assimilate human beings in Star Trek. The social network doesn’t want to get rid of people, it just sees them as sources of input that can be aggregated in a much more efficient way — and it doesn’t want to hurt media companies, it just sees them as content producers whose output can fuel its engagement engines.
To that end, the site would very much like publishers to submit their content directly to Facebook, so that it lives inside the network rather than just being a link to external content. This would be the equivalent of suicide for most traditional media entities, since it would effectively hand control over not just the content but the monetization of that content to Facebook. As Carr puts it, media companies “would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.”
There will almost certainly be companies that take Facebook up on this offer, despite the seemingly unbalanced nature of the deal, just as there were media companies that created “social reading” apps in 2012 that allowed readers to consume content without ever leaving Facebook. That idea ended badly when Facebook changed the way it ranks content and killed those apps in their sleep.
Offer readers the things Facebook can’t
So if Facebook exerts this overwhelming control over how people find and consume and engage with news, what are media companies supposed to do about it? They can’t just ignore the company outright, because that would spell certain doom. Social is the new search, especially when it comes to mobile, and creating great content is useless unless there is some way to ensure that people see it.
For me, the only possible route to survival (notice I didn’t use the word prosperity or success, just survival) is to play in Facebook’s sandbox, but to give up as little as possible — and at the same time, to spend as much or more effort on figuring out how to make your content as engaging and social as it can be on your own terms. Give readers the ability to do things that Facebook can’t or won’t: the ability to interact with you, to be part of the process. That’s why I am such a big believer in media getting to know its audience as intimately as possible.
Marc Andreessen has said that one of the over-riding themes of the current era in technology is that software is eating everything, and that is true. But when it comes to the media, social is eating everything — every form of media and content is becoming social or interactive, whether it wants to be or not, and Facebook’s dominance is a sign of that phenomenon accelerating.
What that means is figuring out how you can benefit from how media works in what Om has called the age of “democratized distribution.” Posting your content and comments on Facebook is only one way, and it may not be the best way, especially in terms of your long-term survival. Explore other options — whether it’s Pinterest or Snapchat or Tumblr. If you hand all of your content and relationships over to Facebook and assume that your work is done, then you have already lost.
A recent piece by CUNY professor and author Jeff Jarvis about how to improve the public’s trust in journalism sparked a Twitter debate among some leading figures in the media industry on the weekend — a debate that centered on whether trust is a meaningful way of looking at the value of news. Since this is a topic that some people even outside the media might be interested in, I collected some of the Twitter discussion in a Storify module, and have also embedded some of it below.
Jarvis’s post was a response to a Medium piece written by Richard Gingras — the head of Google News — and Sally Lehrman, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics who specializes in journalism. In the piece, the two wrote about how the lack of public trust in the media industry is a growing problem, and described some ways in which media companies could try to change that, including:
— Posting a mission statement and ethics policy: “Both news organizations and individual journalists could build trust by stating their objectives, their capabilities and their standards,” Gingras and Lehrman argue.
Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.
— More disclosure about the editing process: “News outlets could signal editing levels by creating a clear labeling system or listing all participants in the process such as fact checkers, editors, and even lawyers.”
— Citations (via links) and corrections: Citations “would allow audiences to assess their effort and accuracy. An effective system would also allow audiences to alert editors to perceived inaccuracies.”
In a nutshell, Gingras and Lehrman argue that more transparency about the way that the news business or the journalism business works would serve readers better and increase trust — and that this in turn would help create value for media companies. They said they have created the Trust Project in partnership with the Markkula Center to pursue such changes in the industry.
In his response, Jarvis suggested that since Gingras is concerned about such issues, he could get his employer to “encourage these behaviors by favoring news organizations, journalists, and other sources that follow standards such as these.” This would be an addition signal of quality that Google could use when surfacing news stories, he argued. Google could also rank sites that produce original work higher than sites that just copy or aggregate it, Jarvis said.
After both Gingras and News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti posted a link to Jarvis’s piece, Emily Bell — who runs the Tow Center for Digital Media at Columbia University — questioned whether looking at trust was the right way to think about value in journalism, or increasing the likelihood of success in media.
Although one or two of the suggestions make sense, the idea 'trust' would transform journalism is badly framed https://t.co/CdknqI0Ai0
Bell argued that identifying “trustworthiness” was a difficult concept to begin with, since some people might find a certain news source interesting or valuable without it necessarily being trustworthy — and others might disagree on whether a specific outlet was trustworthy or not because of their political views. Bell and others also said that asking Google to measure quality journalism was problematic.
ask the question 'was Edward Snowden trustworthy?'. To most yes, to others absolutely not. People trust what they believe for most part
One point that Bell seemed to be making was that the success of a media outlet — and particularly its financial success — doesn’t really have any relationship to whether it is “trusted” or not, with BuzzFeed being a good example: in a recent Pew survey, the site ranked low on trustworthiness, and yet its readership and its revenue base appears to be large and growing rapidly.
@PJPrest and external trust has no bearing on performance of business (which is the fallacy at the heart of this suggestion)
Gingras admitted that trust might not be a good substitute or proxy for journalistic value, but he argued that good journalism can’t exist unless readers trust either the news source or the reporter, or both. But Bell countered that in both the NSA leaks case and the Pentagon Papers case, the source of the information was widely mis-trusted, and yet the news stories were still worthwhile.
@emilybell@raju@jeffjarvis Trust does not dictate good journalism but you can't have good journalism without trusting the source/reporter.
At this point, Chris Anderson — a ** at ** who has written about media topics, including a book on the decline of the news business in Philadelphia — pointed out that there is no real correlation between the trustworthiness of journalism and the quality of that journalism, noting that the media was trusted more in the 1950s than at any time since, but the journalism was arguably terrible.
Bell pointed out that large numbers of people distrust major news entities such as the New York Times or the Guardian — in other words, people from one side of the political likely distrust the Times but trust Fox News, and others feel the opposite. And she argued that while Walter Cronkite may have been widely trusted during the heyday of TV news, no one would argue that was the best time for journalism.
It’s worth noting that despite her criticism of some aspects of the argument, or about trust as a measure of value, Bell made a point of saying that she agrees with the approach outlined by Gingras and Lehrman, and noted that she was part of the original thinking behind the Guardian‘s embrace of “open journalism.” But trust is a difficult way to measure value because it so subjective, she said. What follows is the Storify I created to capture some of the discussion.
