Facebook deserves more credit for the success of Facebook Groups
Some niche Facebook communities really are thriving.
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Gizmodo: Facebook Is Officially Beta Testing Hotline, a Clubhouse-Inspired Audio Q&A Feature
From the article:
Creators will address an audience of users, who will then be able to respond by asking questions with either text or audio. Unlike Clubhouse — which is strictly an audio-only platform — Hotline users will have the option to turn their cameras on during events, adding a visual element to an otherwise voice-dominated experience.
I’ve seen plenty of people citing this as yet another example of how the tech behemoths don’t actually innovate anymore, but rather just copy the features of their rising competitors. First everyone copied Snapchat Stories. Then everybody started developing their own newsletter platforms. Now every company is rolling out its own Clubhouse clone.
But I could actually see this as a really good tool to utilize in Facebook Groups. Longtime readers of mine know that I operate a private Facebook group that I only promote within this newsletter. It has about 500 members, most of whom work in media, and I’m often amazed at the level of discussion and engagement I get on my posts there. It’s quickly become my favorite method of interacting with my readers. Sure, I don’t mind when subscribers reply directly to my newsletter within the inbox, but the Facebook group allows me to conduct these conversations out in the open where more people can participate and receive value from the discussion.
I’ve been thinking about ways to deepen my engagement within this group, and I recently solicited questions from its members; I hope to take these and answer them in a vlog that I will then upload to the group. But this Clubhouse-like tool outlined in the link above sounds like it would provide a better solution, allowing me to interact with members in real time. What’s more, I could see a scenario in which I choose one or two media entrepreneurs within the group and host a joint discussion. I think my biggest question is whether these sessions are recorded so those who didn’t attend live can watch them on playback. I’m pretty sure Facebook Live provides on-demand playback, and I hope the company extends that feature to this new tool.
I have to say, I’ve been mostly impressed with Facebook Groups. Mark Zuckerberg triggered a wave of criticism a few years back when he announced that the Newsfeed algorithm would prioritize Groups over Pages, but in the intervening years I’ve certainly received a lot more value out of the Groups I belong to than any of the Pages I follow. They do a fairly good job of allowing users to follow and participate in niche topics, and depending on the niche and the level of hands-on moderation, the quality of the conversation can be extremely high.
That’s not to say that Groups can’t breed some level of toxicity. NBC News published a good feature article recently on a Pennsylvania town that’s sprouted some large local Facebook Groups, and while these Groups certainly provide great informational value around local events, they also hosted plenty of deranged, misinformation-prone discussions relating to crime and other hot button issues. It’s a great example of how an online community’s discussion is only as good as its moderation allows it to be.
How a VC investor grew her newsletter to over 100,000 subscribers
Every week, Codie Sanchez sits down to write a several thousand word newsletter that now reaches the inboxes of over 100,000 recipients. Not only has it raised her profile within the VC world, but it’s quickly becoming a powerhouse business of its own, driving six figures in revenue.
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Digiday: How Bustle Digital Group sets up shoppable options within its editorial content
From the article:
Launching in beta to readers on Friday, editors will select certain articles on Bustle.com to feature shopping carousels of featured products that are mentioned in the story or are complementary to the piece.
“It’s not just limited to [a] storefront. The shopping experience really is baked in across the site,” said Nic Barajas, senior product manager at BDG. Once a reader clicks on the product, its information is featured in a sidebar on the content page so the user doesn’t lose their reading place. They can then see the price, size options, color options, etc., and add it to the cart from that position. “We’re not glomming a shop onto the existing website, we’re baking commerce content natively into the website experience,” he said.
How much ecommerce tech can you place within your content before the content starts becoming unreadable? I feel like this is testing those limits.
JackConteExtras: Patreon just raised $155 MILLION
Patreon CEO Jack Conte has a YouTube channel and his videos always provide a really interesting perspective on the future of the creator economy.
Conte has some pretty rosy predictions that, within the next five to 10 years, the term “starving artist” will be outdated, and that people will pursue careers as creators the same way they become lawyers, doctors, or teachers. He calls this coming era the Second Renaissance.
TJCX: Tracking the front page of the New York Times
This is a fascinating breakdown of what stories The New York Times promotes on its front page.
One random article about how to make the best scrambled eggs stayed on the front page for six days.
But the most surprising finding is that a whopping 53% of homepage articles consist of either opinion or “fluff,” vs the 47% dedicated to hard news. We think of the latter as being one of the largest drivers of paid conversions, but given the sophistication of NYT’s data analytics, I don’t think they would feature so much non-news content if it didn’t play a huge role in selling subscriptions.
Amplifi Media: Why there really aren’t 2 million podcasts
From the article:
Out of the two million titles reflected in Apple Podcasts (and similar results from Podcast Index), a remarkable 26% have produced just a single episode. One and done. That suggests many people fired up their creative juices, especially during the pandemic, and stopped after creating one episode. Roughly 1/4th of all podcasts are out of business, or more likely, were never really in it.
There are a lot of podcasts out there, but most die off after only a few episodes. If you can stick it out for at least 100 episodes, then you have a really good chance of finding an audience.
This dovetails nicely with a piece from Tom Webster analyzing audience growth trends for the podcast industry over the last few years:
Not only are the percentage of weekly and monthly listeners continuing to grow, but the conversion rate of monthly to weekly listeners is also growing. My friend Pierre Bouvard calls this percentage “habituation,” but you can think of it simply as the percentage of people who listen to podcasts that have made them a regular part of their media diet. Back in 2013, 58% of monthly listeners were also weekly listeners. Today, 68% of monthly listeners are also weekly listeners. This conversion number is not guaranteed to go up every year — even in years when there are increases in both the monthly and weekly numbers! It is a true measure of the “stickiness” of podcasts.
This really illustrates how early we are in the maturation of the podcast industry, which is weird to think about considering that the medium was invented 15 years ago — around the same time that YouTube launched. And yet I would say that podcasting today is at about the same maturation point that YouTube was back in, say, 2012. Back then, YouTube could boast about high viewership numbers, but this was long before it became the advertising juggernaut it is today.
Why is podcasting so far behind? Probably because it wasn’t until 2018 or so when a company stepped in to serve as the “YouTube of podcasts,” so to speak. That’s around the time that Spotify opened its platform up to all podcasts and began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire its own podcast IP.
All this is to say is that there’s still ample opportunity to get in “early” on podcasts and ride that wave of growth as the market matures. In the next few years, we’re going to see some huge podcast stars emerge — people who are completely unknown today.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.