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0 pointsevgen11y ago0 comments

With Facebook, they abused the trust marketers put into them. From day one the conversation was about building your brand's presence on Facebook with the "understanding" you would more or less be able to communicate with your audience freely once you invested in building the list.

Bullshit. There was never this "understanding", just an assumption by people who were too blinded by greed to do a little simple math. There is only so much attention to go around and only so many items that can be put into a persons feed before it loses any value to that person. You were only able to communicate freely to this audience because there were so few using the channel. Once it was shown to actually be effective you were competing with everyone else for that small slice of attention. Welcome to the market pal, hope you brought your wallet! If a marketer complains because everything they post each day isn't pinned to the top of people's news feeds for free then it seems to me that FB is doing it's job. I would much rather have my feed curated for things that are relevant for me than for every piece of marketing some store I once liked four years ago wants to send me.

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shostack11y ago

The harsh words here are unnecessary and don't do anything for your argument.

There were actually plenty of people using the channel when advertisers still had the ability to reach their entire fanbase. There was a long period of time when this was simply the way it worked. Thus, I think it is reasonable for companies to be forgiven for thinking that they would continue to be able to reach this audience in the same manner once they invested in acquiring them.

Now, I have always thought email had more value just because of what you can do with it, but if you tell me to invest in your ad platform to drive people to signup for me to contact them on a page on your platform, and let me reach them for free after the initial investment, I think it is perfectly reasonable to feel extremely cheated when you change the terms of the deal to suddenly double-dip. There is a reason a large part of the ad industry has erupted at FB over this and why anyone spending serious money on social these days is driving all that traffic offsite to places they control, and/or using their own audience data through a DSP with FB simply serving as a "dumb" placement.

unclebucknasty11y ago

>There is only so much attention to go around and only so many items that can be put into a persons feed before it loses any value to that person.

True, but it's reasonable to expect that users might've simply dialed down the noise by "un-liking" whatever pages with which they no longer wanted to be engaged.

So, I don't think it was at all unreasonable for a company to assume that it would have to compete on interest and thus ensure that its content was more compelling/engaging. That versus simply being forced to pay, else reach only 1% of the people they worked so hard to gain as "fans".

Further, if FB's direction should have been obvious to companies, as you say, then FB should certainly have known. So, while encouraging pages/likes/etc., why not telegraph to the businesses that their reach would eventually be so heavily gated behind a paywall?

You're being far too "forgiving" of FB and far too harsh on the companies that were, effectively, on the receiving end of a bait-and-switch.

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