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In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg said the following: "We are entering this new golden age of video. . . I would not be surprised if you move quickly in five years and the majority of the content that people see on Facebook and share daily is video. A little more than a month later, according to a lawsuit, the company would follow up on complaints it knew about video metrics problems since 2015. A few months later, Facebook finally, very discreetly admitted that she had misstated the key metrics.
This. pic.twitter.com/PtWZHodVT6
– Jason Kint (@jason_kint) October 17, 2018
Now, advertisers are suing the company that would have prepared the books without disclosing this miscalculation. And the media are furious with this development. Rightly: For more than two years, the media sector has been punctuated by a terrible euphemism called "pivot video". With the revenue decline of traditional digital advertising, Facebook has been able to convince online publishers that video would be the next gold mine of the media. The company has launched into the medium: it has changed its algorithm to favor moving images, while convincing advertisers and publishers of the need to implement a long-term strategy focused on video that would solve their income problems.
For advertisers, video was just another way to reach the eyes. For publishers, it was something different: media managers revised entire budgets to adapt to the new trend and hired new teams to create fast, consumable videos that would theoretically provide them with more ad revenue . The editorial and editorial positions were removed, resulting in layoffs. For more than a year, news has failed to say that media brands divert their resources to innovative content. Nobody really knew what was working in the pivot of the video, but they were assured that if they followed the instructions, things would bear fruit.
Of course, Facebook should be in prison, but let's not forget all brainless media leaders who have taken the turn for the video when anyone literally works on the ground in the media, or even uses the Internet all days, knew it. It was bullshit.
– Barry Petchesky (@barry) October 17, 2018
It turns out that it was all based on a poorly calculated metric that Facebook had known for a long time before the problem was solved. According to the lawsuit, the company has adopted a "no public relations" strategy to avoid admitting these mistakes.
If you missed this: today, it has been confirmed that Facebook was massively and knowingly inflating its video viewing statistics, with the direct result that 90% of media organizations were sending writers back to video producers. expensive, who were also fired. was void https://t.co/WqdAUBIe6L
– Chris Conroy (@dyfl) October 17, 2018
Facebook, for its part, denies having ever consciously reported false statistics. I spoke to the company to share their comments. I will update this post if I have heard it.
In 2015, John Herrman wrote for the Punch on various editorial projects with which the platforms have played, in order to better control the centralization of the media ecosystem. The idea was to create applications and projects that would blur the line between the platform and the publisher. Although the transition to the video was a whisper, it was clear that a big change was on the horizon. He wrote:
Publications, large or small, but especially large, have spent the last few years in a sort of para-economy, watching their audiences and sometimes their revenues explode as a result of informal partnerships with social platforms, which were happy to let these foreigners manage to adapt all sorts of functions. writing and images and video in their new contexts. The self-pitying / magnifying explanation of the annexation of media attention by the platforms would be that in recent years was a kind of free start-up period during which the media was giving Facebook unconditional content in exchange for Converted Attention into Revenue A Facebook advertising system simultaneously targeted destruction.
And indeed, Facebook has destroyed it. What followed was followed by media companies trying to regain their place by following the platform's initiative.
News, like today's, highlights the real impact of major technology platforms and their dominance over content distribution. It is true that the advertising ecosystem was changing, but also hundreds of people who lost their jobs. It is more and more as if it were due to a whim of the business model based on erroneous statistics.
Advertisers are now coming together to try to get pecuniary justice for the alleged harm caused by Facebook, but what about publishers? Will they recover their work?
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