Facebook's grip on the news industry is smaller than you think
Most publishers spent the last four years diversifying their traffic beyond Facebook.
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Nieman Lab: In Australia, Facebook’s ban on sharing news stories has sent publishers’ traffic tumbling
These are some interesting data points about how Facebook's Australian news ban is affecting publishers, but I think it's way too early to determine what the longterm effects will be. Australian citizens just simply haven’t had time yet to reorient their internet browsing habits.
Back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would significantly reduce the exposure of news publishers in the Newsfeed. In the months following these changes, news apps like Apple News, Smartnews, and Flipboard saw huge surges in user adoption, to the point where they became some of the top referrers to publishers. News sites also saw their Twitter referral traffic more than double.
Publishers have also been almost singularly focused these last four years on diversifying their referral traffic, mainly by converting their audiences into newsletter subscribers. I’m on the phone with publishers every week, and I can tell you firsthand that they rarely mention Facebook anymore as one of their main growth channels.
Want to hear my prediction? I think that within the next few months Australian news publisher traffic will mostly stabilize as users seek out other portals for consuming and discussing news (I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter sees a huge upsurge in usage). The few publishers that do get seriously hurt by this will be the aggregators that do very little original reporting and rely on Facebook’s algorithm to push viral content.
I actually think this policy will end up hurting Facebook in the long run. After all, who wants to use a social network that severely restricts your ability to discuss current events?
Inside the career of a successful ghostwriter
Jonathan Rick’s opinion writing appears regularly in places like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, and Fast Company. He gets paid thousands of dollars for each piece, often more than the per-word rates of other freelancers who write for these same outlets.
There’s just one catch: his byline rarely appears on the op-eds.
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The Verge: The podcast wars will come down to ad tech, not exclusive content
I think podcast dominance will have more to do with owning the audience than having the best ad tech. That's why Spotify's ad tech will always out perform iHeart Media's ad tech: because Spotify has much better data on its users' listening habits.
Let’s consider a hypothetical iHeart Media show that I want to listen to. I’ll need to download it via its RSS feed on one of dozens of existing podcast apps. iHeart Media’s ad tech will get access to some basic information like where I’m geographically located and maybe what device I’m using, but those podcast players are otherwise a black box. iHeart doesn’t know what other podcasts I listen to, and certainly not what other music I listen to.
Spotify, on the other hand, has all of that data and more. It has access to my email address. It probably has my billing information and maybe even home address.
So in the end, I think exclusive content is more important than ad tech, because exclusive content drives people to download and user your app, which then provides you much better data to target ads against.
NYT: This Cloud Computing Billing Expert Is Very Funny. Seriously.
This is a perfect example of content marketing at its best. Companies can actually produce helpful, accurate information that's just as good as anything you see at a traditional media outlet.
The problem is most brands simply don't know how to do this and/or aren't willing to invest in it.
Substack: New! Better analytics for your subscribers
A lot of people have been saying that if Substack wants to continue to dominate against emerging competitors, it needs to keep rolling out new features. This is what that looks like.
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Creator spotlight: How Esther Kezia Thorpe built the Media Voices Podcast
Esther makes a pretty good case here for why you should adapt your podcast episodes into articles that are easy to share on social media.
Bloomberg: YouTube’s Quick-Video Answer to TikTok Coming to U.S. in March
You have to appreciate the irony that YouTube has spent years forcing YouTubers to produce longer and longer videos -- to the point that many videos started to feel too padded -- and now TikTok is forcing it to radically pivot in the opposite direction.
Creator spotlight: How Brian McCullough built Techmeme Ride Home, a daily tech podcast
What's the best way to grow your podcast?
"100% being on other podcasts. This can mean buying ads on other podcasts to promote my podcast, but better is going on other people's podcasts and (hopefully) having something smart to say."
Axios: LinkedIn is the latest tech giant to launch a creator program
The thing is, LinkedIn rolled out a native blogging platform in 2014, which was really exciting, but then it never quite figured out how to really foster its creator community, and as a result you rarely see LinkedIn blog posts getting shared anywhere.
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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.