by Acadia Otlowski
Social media is the future of media and it is about time that publishers accept it.
The mainstream media has been slow to keep up with the rapidly changing technological world for quite some time — its efforts to switch over to a mainly mobile audience being clumsy at best.
Facebook has approached publishers recently, trying to find a way in which major news sources could join with Facebook to create a mutually beneficial relationship. A symbiotic relationship if you will. The company has reportedly offered publishers the option to host their content on Facebook’s mobile application. Facebook and publishers would each take half of the revenue generated by these pages.
In the past, by having users share what they are reading with friends through an app, the company has attempted to make news consumption a more social experience.
This ultimately failed because users became annoyed by the over sharing; they didn’t care to know every single article their friends were reading.
But this isn’t the be all, end all. The experiment brought quite a bit of traffic to media websites.
And even without a specific app dedicated to media consumption, more than half of the New York Times online traffic is through the mobile platform. This number increases every month, and other publishers boast similar numbers.
But users are often frustrated because, instead of providing a fluid online experience, many traditional media mobile sites are clunky at best and unusable at worst. What Facebook will offer is a better, more usable mobile news consumption experience. There would be no more links to mobile sites that do not work.
This deal would give media outlets access to Facebook’s 654 million users. While it seems like a good deal for larger publishers, it might actually benefit smaller publishers more. These platforms may not have a huge audience and might actually make more revenue through Facebook.
Although this deal seems like it may change the relationship between traditional media and social media forever, publishers should be wary of putting all their eggs in one basket. What if Facebook goes the way of Myspace and fails? Now what happens to smaller companies who totally rely on this new technology?
Facebook is in a much stronger place than Myspace was. It is trying to make itself a necessity to the population. That being said, it would still be unwise for publishers to fully depend on the company.
Regardless, this deal could help publishers gain revenue and allow them to observe the tactics that Facebook uses to draw in consumers. Publishers can use these methods to make their own, independent mobile sites better and more profitable.