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With algorithmic changes underway for Facebook’s news feed, which will devalue most media content in favor of posts shared by users, the future of Facebook Watch will be tied to how well Facebook and video makers can get people to click over to the Watch section to view shows.

Right now, the vast majority of Watch viewing happens inside the news feed, according to four media companies that have sold shows to Facebook. When users follow a particular show, new episodes are then seeded inside the news feed like content from any other Facebook page that a user might follow.

“No one’s going to the Watch tab; no one’s going to your Facebook page, either,” said a publishing executive. “And that’s the issue; if our videos are not going to show up in the news feed, how are we going to get people to go over to Watch?”

Facebook has been experimenting with a few tools designed to get people to go to Watch. For instance, when a user follows a show, they will see a red notification when a new episode is available. Shows can also be featured at the top of the production company’s or media brand’s Facebook page, which usually have larger followings than Watch pages dedicated to individual shows.

But both of these tools have been available since Watch launched in August, and neither has helped create a habit among most Facebook users to go to Watch for the latest programming, multiple Watch partners said.

Yet there is some hope that Facebook won’t completely cut off Watch programming from the news feed.

“Facebook has made it clear that they want to reward intentional viewing and deprioritize accidental or passive viewing,” said a second Watch partner. “The whole philosophy behind Watch is intentional viewing: It’s more premium, well-produced video that’s meant to elicit a stronger reaction and repeated viewership from Facebook’s audience.”

Other Watch partners said Facebook has told them it will favor videos and shows that users choose to watch, with the thinking that this would make them more likely to show up in the news feed. Facebook already favors Watch shows that have repeat viewership, which indicates people are choosing to watch the show. That’s a type of engagement that Facebook would support, along with programming that viewers interact with in some fashion. (Facebook is also testing a new feature called Watch Party, which allows multiple users to watch and interact with video at the same time.)

Another view is that whatever happens to the news feed, Facebook has committed enough resources to Watch and video in general that it’s not likely to kill it just five months after launching, said one Watch partner. This is even after what many consider to be a misfire by Facebook to kick-start Watch with cheap and unscripted short-form shows.

“There is really no logic to them shuttering Watch at this point in time,” said the second Watch partner. “They wouldn’t have hired the executives that they have. I don’t think Facebook is going to be fickle about their long-term play in Watch.”

The hope for Facebook and its media partners is that Facebook can develop another YouTube-esque platform where users actively go to watch videos. Under this scenario, Facebook would likely spin off Watch into its own app — similar to what the company did with Facebook Messenger once it hit a critical mass. Facebook already has a dedicated video app for connected TVs, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that app is available across platforms in the form of a spun-off Watch app.

But that’s merely fantasy until Facebook can convince its users that it, too, is a video platform.

“At the end of the day, Watch has yet to become a thing,” said an executive at a TV and digital media giant. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done before we can tell you whether we’re bearish or bullish on it.”

One point made by several Watch partners is how little Facebook’s algorithm change will affect how much they’re making from their Watch shows. There are two primary ways for video makers to earn money on Watch: getting Facebook or an advertiser to fund the show. In both instances, creators can turn a profit off of the production margin — and in Facebook’s case, if the show makes more money from pre-roll and mid-roll ad revenue than it cost to produce, creators get 55 cents of every additional dollar made.

Facebook’s ad program has not driven any meaningful revenue for most media partners, though, which means the only dollars that video creators see is from the margin they bake into a show’s budget. Some Watch partners also have the opportunity to make additional money by redistributing the show on other platforms after Facebook’s exclusivity runs out, but even here, Facebook is pursuing stricter deal terms that either give it longer periods of exclusivity or total ownership of the show.

There is some hope on the horizon: Facebook is warming to the idea of letting media partners sell their own ad inventory, including that available inside Watch programming — something many partners have pressured Facebook to do for months. This would allow media companies to sell broader, multiplatform ad packages that could include sponsorships and ad slots inside Watch programming, according to one Watch publisher, which previously was able to sell sponsorship for one of its Facebook-funded Watch shows but was rebuffed by Facebook.

“When someone makes that kind of pivot or acknowledgement, then it’s easier for us to lean in because they eliminated that friction,” said the TV and digital media executive. “Think about where Hulu used to be and where it is today: Hulu used to be about [selling] Hulu [ad inventory] first; then they realized they probably have a greater chance at success by giving media companies more flexibility to monetize their shows.”

The common refrain among most media executives is that Facebook has the money and the power to do anything it sets its mind to. But it’s set its mind to video for several years now, and the company hasn’t had much to show outside of a few viral video clips and the LaVar Ball-starring “Ball in the Family,” which many industry sources consider to be the sole hit out of Facebook’s initial crop of funded shows.

If publishers are less willing to give Facebook a long leash after its decision to nuke the news feed, the video creators making shows for Watch will arrive at a similar decision at some point. Privately, some Watch partners are willing to acknowledge that making Watch shows is driven by Facebook’s willingness to pay for it — not because they’re certain Watch is the next big thing in video.

“Honestly, I’m very down on it,” said the first Facebook Watch partner. “I just don’t see people on Facebook caring about long-form shows, and I don’t know how many people anyone can convince to do that [on Facebook].”

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Local newspaper conglomerate Digital First Media is going to focus a lot more on email this year, with plans to launch e-newsletters for its markets beyond Denver, Colorado, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The push will help Digital First, which gets about a fifth of its traffic from Facebook, diversify away from the platform.

The shift away from Facebook will take on more urgency in 2018 now that Facebook is privileging users’ content over publisher pages’ content. Some are returning to old standbys like search and email; others are putting more resources into different platform products. For example, Stephanie Fried, evp of research analytics and audience development at Condé Nast, said some of the people the company now allocates to Facebook may wind up focusing on Instagram Stories.

In most cases, the goal is to build sustained engagement with publishers’ content, rather than chasing the flyby traffic that Facebook sometimes drove. “We need to focus a lot more on engagement and conversation,” said Dan Petty, digital director of audience development at Digital First Media. “The focus is much more on, ‘How do I get someone who’s coming two to three times a month to come four, five, six times in a given month?’”

Facebook is no longer the top source of referral traffic for publishers, but it’s been a top priority, particularly for ad-supported lifestyle publishers. In some cases, Facebook was responsible for 70, 80 or even 90 percent of their referral traffic. Facebook drove so much traffic and demanded so much attention that publishers had to have Facebook-specific teams.

“Social is the only place where we have brands focused on one channel,” said Fried. “That may change now.”

One reason Facebook required so much attention is because the platform’s priorities were always changing. And as they shifted, from shares to reactions to video to friends and family to live video and so on, audience teams have found themselves more focused on decoding Facebook than on building relationships with the audiences they amassed on it.

“We just learned the rules of the game and played it,” said one audience development executive, who asked not to be identified. “[Facebook] wasn’t great at driving loyalty. It just sucked up our time and gave us cheap traffic.”

Even though last week’s news has dominated conversations among digital publishers, many of them had begun shifting how their audience development teams were used well before the announcement.

The Economist, for example, grouped members of its audience, product and editorial teams together into so-called “tribes” last summer to improve site performance indicators like time spent and increase the publisher’s mobile app usage.

The Texas Tribune, in a bid for more membership revenue, now looks at membership growth as its primary metric rather than pageviews. It embedded its membership team, which pursues donations of $1,000 or less, inside the audience team back in June.

Even though Facebook’s signaled that publishers should rely on it less, publishers say they’re weeks away from knowing the true impact of Facebook’s announcement. But even if there’s near-term pain, many feel that Facebook distancing itself from publishers will be positive in the long run.

“The feeling, both public and private, is that people seem quite relieved,” said one audience head at an international publisher, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We were feeling hostage to Facebook for quite a while.”

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YouTube is tightening up requirements for content creators to quell advertiser concerns following the Logan Paul controversy. Under YouTube’s new rules, creators of channels need more than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time to earn money from ads, while videos on Google Preferred, which represent the top 5 percent of most-viewed channels, will be reviewed by humans, not algorithms, before they are monetized.

As the debate around brand safety matures, advertisers fall into one of two camps: those that think Google has taken positive steps to tackle the issue over the past 12 months and others who believe Google won’t exert more control over controversial content for fear of losing money. Advertisers publicly welcomed the latest overhaul but have lingering questions:

Will advertisers have to pay more for brand safety?
YouTube is rolling out a three-tier “suitability system” for advertisers to pick their level of comfort with the content they’re buying against. By taking these steps, Google may reduce YouTube’s reach for advertisers but ensure a safer environment for ads, said Norm Johnston, chief digital officer at Mindshare Worldwide. Chasing broad reach at any cost is what led to brand-safety problems in the first place, he said. But advertisers wonder if this approach means they will end up paying even more for brand safety.

Is AI the solution for better brand safety?
Google has said it will use artificial intelligence to sift through all the videos uploaded to channels on Google Preferred before they go through another check by employees. Google execs have told agencies that the algorithm has a 99.9 percent success rate in filtering out inappropriate content, said two separate agency bosses, speaking on condition of anonymity. As accurate as YouTube’s AI sounds, advertisers want to see some evidence of it working before they pump money back into Google Preferred. As Peter Wallace, U.K. commercial director at GumGum, said: “There will be questions about the scalability of Google’s proposals given the sheer volume of content being uploaded to YouTube.”

How big is the brand-safety risk for viral content?
Google has told advertisers that shielding ads from inappropriate videos is tough because so much of the content it hosts is time-sensitive. Advertisers want evidence of how big the issue is; they’ve asked YouTube to disclose the percentage of YouTube views that are time-sensitive versus those that build up over time.

Why won’t YouTube protect brands from inappropriate comments on videos?
Google decided not to turn off comments on kid-related and news videos despite pressure from advertisers to do so. The U.K. agency trade body the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising had proposed the move to the online giant last month when the two met behind closed doors. Google responded that such a move “wasn’t appropriate,” according to an executive who was there and spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity.

How detailed will YouTube’s brand-safety reporting be?
YouTube has promised to provide regular transparency reports on brand safety. Advertisers and agencies wonder how granular those insights will be. Dan Larden, global strategic partnerships director at Infectious Media, said the agency is booking campaigns directly with content creators due to its brand-safety concerns on YouTube. “But this comes at a higher price and gives us less reach,” he said.

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Amazon is on top of every marketer’s mind today. Google and Facebook combined still represent more than half of the U.S. advertising market, but Amazon’s ad business, while just 2.5 percent, is growing faster than both of them, according to speakers at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York City.

Scott Galloway, founder of consultancy L2, predicts that digital ad revenue for Amazon Media Group, Amazon’s in-house team that sells ad products, will grow more than 40 percent year-over-year. That’s faster than Facebook, which is poised to grow about 25 percent; and Google, about 15 percent, Galloway said in his presentation on Jan. 17.

Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said Amazon has aggressively hired marketing talent from top universities over the past year or so. “One in eight kids in my class goes to work for Amazon,” Galloway said.

Another presenter, Geoff Ramsey, co-founder and chief innovation officer for eMarketer, also discussed Amazon’s growth. Ramsey said that although the duopoly accounts for more than 65 percent of U.S. ad spend, compared to 2.5 percent from Amazon, Amazon was the second-fastest growing advertising company last year, second only to Snapchat. Ramsey estimated that this year, Amazon’s advertising business will increase by 42 percent compared to a year prior. He didn’t give baselines.

“Facebook and Google are also under increasing pressure to clean up their acts,” said Ramsey. “Brands want to be in a safe environment. Trust is becoming a real issue [for Facebook and Google] in light of activities like fake news.”

Amazon’s consumer-obsessed culture has helped it win advertisers, Seth Dallaire, vp of global advertising sales and marketing for AMG, said during a fireside chat. And Amazon’s growth in advertising can also be attributed to advertisers gradually adopting e-commerce as a marketing discipline, he said.

“Two years ago, we oftentimes had to explain why we had an advertising business,” Dallaire said on stage. “But now, we go beyond that, and the tenor of the [client] conversation is more urgent, centered on how advertising on Amazon works. Holding companies are looking to build capacity in data interpretation and e-commerce marketing, while boutique agencies are very focused on search and programmatic display [on Amazon].”

One reason behind Amazon’s growing ad business is that with AMG, it requires clients to spend a minimum amount on some ad products. One product has a threshold of $100,000, for example. A media buyer, speaking anonymously, said AMG can provide managed service if an advertiser doesn’t know how to use the self-serve Amazon Advertising Platform yet plans to spend more than $35,000 on display advertising on Amazon. In that case, AMG would charge a percentage of the advertiser’s media spend as a managed service fee and a platform fee on top of that, this person said.

Dallaire said Amazon will continue investing in ad tech, search advertising and data intelligence products. One area where Amazon is not going to incorporate advertising is its voice assistant Alexa, although Ramsey said Amazon has about a 70 percent share of the voice market.

“Our advertisers are interested in Alexa and how their brands may be able to interact with their audience there, but we don’t plan to have ad products for Alexa,” said Dallaire.

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Cloud storage isn’t sexy, but it’s often cost-efficient.

In September, IAC — the parent company of publishers including Dotdash, Investopedia and The Daily Beast — finished a 12-month project of moving the data storage and back-end tech infrastructure of its 50 digital media sites to the cloud. No longer having to maintain 400 servers across eight different physical locations will save IAC $10 million a year, the company said.

The toughest part of making this change is that cloud computing services use their own programming languages, said Maxx Lobo, vp of platform and cloud services at IAC Publishing. Once IAC decided to make this change, it had to train 425 developers and engineers to write and analyze code for Amazon Web Services, the vendor that IAC chose.

IAC wouldn’t say how much it pays Amazon for cloud services, but it acknowledged that its scale allowed it to negotiate a cheaper rate than the standard prices on Amazon’s website. For companies that store 100 terabytes of data with Amazon, its standard monthly rate is 2 cents per gigabyte.

Instead of migrating data to the cloud on a site-by-site basis, IAC migrated pieces of multiple sites simultaneously over the cloud, Lobo said. The first pieces of code it moved to the cloud were consumer-facing products like the design elements that make up its websites. Last to move to the cloud were its data lakes that host its raw user data.

Another challenge of pulling off a project this big is getting people to go along with it.

“The hardest part of large-scale cloud migrations isn’t technical,” said Ben Jackson, founder of publisher consulting firm For the Win. “It’s building consensus with stakeholders across dozens of sites, each with its own team, priorities and limitations.”

Getting executives to back the project enabled IAC to get 50 different sites to agree on it, Lobo said.

“Our CEO put a stake in the ground and said, ‘We are going to do it,’” Lobo said.

Other media companies have migrated their data to the cloud in recent years. Condé Nast did this back in 2014. Spotify and The New York Times also made these changes in the past two years.

While IAC Publishing — the IAC unit that includes Dotdash, Investopedia, The Daily Beast, Ask.com and Dictionary.com — is now fully on the cloud, its other business units are not. This includes its video platforms like Vimeo and CollegeHumor as well as Match Group, which is made up of dating networks like Tinder and OkCupid. A company spokesperson said IAC plans to eventually bring all of its properties to the cloud, but no timeline has been set.

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WWE has a legacy TV business and a growing subscription streaming app — and it’s a giant on YouTube, Facebook and other social platforms. But as the company plans to do more scripted and unscripted programming for TV, streaming video and social platforms, it’s putting many its video teams in one place to do so.

For instance, WWE premiered a new live show on Facebook Watch on Jan. 16 called the “Mixed Match Challenge,” which features WWE stars competing in a tag-team tournament for charities. Each episode of the 12-episode series will run for 20 to 30 minutes and will feature additional short-form content meant to hype different matches and episodes to WWE’s Facebook audience. The first episode had about 126,000 live viewers and has generated 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours.

Facebook is looking for original shows that can have social and interactive elements beyond the core episodes. With WWE’s talent and avid fan base, the company can create community-centric programming, said Michelle Wilson, chief revenue and marketing officer for WWE. The company will use its talent’s social pages to promote the show, and let fans vote on the final competitors from its Raw and SmackDown brands.

“I’ve sat in all of the meetings as we’ve been developing this show, and we’ve continued to say that we cannot think about this as a regular TV show,” Wilson said. “Our writers are sitting in the same room with our TV, digital and social teams to figure out how to do it. It’s a different approach that’s true to the Facebook platform and our fans on Facebook.”

Last year, WWE purchased another office space at its Stamford, Connecticut, headquarters and produced 1,500 hours of original programming, including 600 hours of short-form digital video. As the company expands its video production business this year, WWE wants its long-form producers and editors to sit beside its short-form producers and editors. Overall, WWE has about 350 employees within its TV and digital media divisions.

As part of WWE’s video expansion plans, the company’s Los Angeles-based WWE Studios unit, which previously focused on theatrical and home-entertainment releases, is now actively developing and pitching show ideas to TV and digital buyers. WWE has some experience on this front, with shows such as “Total Divas” on E! and a Ric Flair documentary for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.

“Up until now, an opportunity such as ‘Divas’ or the Ric Flair documentary would come along, and we’d flip it,” said George Barrios, chief strategy and financial officer for WWE. “We are now ready to go from opportunistic to aggressive; this is now a strategic imperative, whether it’s TV, Netflix, Amazon or even YouTube Red.”

The WWE executives said they’re able to become aggressive in part due to the success the company has found building an audience on digital and social platforms.

WWE’s subscription streaming service, WWE Network, had 1.51 million paying members as of September 2017 and is bringing in twice the revenue of its legacy pay-per-view business, the company said.

On external platforms, WWE also looms large: On YouTube, WWE’s main channel has 21 million subscribers and 19.5 billion lifetime views, making it the second-most viewed YouTube channel of all time. On Facebook, WWE’s main page has 37.8 million followers. WWE stars, too, have large followings on this platform. John Cena’s Facebook page, for instance, has more than 45 million likes; YouTube channels such as The Bella Twins and the gaming-focused UpUpDownDown each have over a million subscribers.

Overall, WWE said it surpassed 20 billion views across digital and social platforms last year.

This reach comes in handy when WWE goes to market with different series projects, Wilson said. “We do our brand presentation, which hits on [WWE’s digital and social numbers], and then we pitch a show concept,” she said. “We’re able to remind them that when they’re deciding on a show, we can bring in a huge social audience.”

Image provided by WWE

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With weeks to go before the shows begin, New York Fashion Week has taken yet another hit.

Alexander Wang announced Wednesday that he will shift his runway calendar to show collections in June and December, and split those collections into a monthly delivery schedule.

In doing so, he’s the latest to join the many designers and brands that have fled the traditional New York fashion calendar in favor of business strategies that better suit a changing industry. Wang’s become known for his New York Fashion Week parties and press spectacles: In September, a brigade of models streamed off of a bus and onto a runway that was staged on a closed Brooklyn road. Musical performances and high-profile celebrity appearances followed during the after party. The whole to-do was dubbed “#WangFest.

With Wang’s departure adding to the the steady stream of designers who have already departed the schedule, NYFW feels in danger of losing a considerable amount of steam. Over the course of several fashion seasons, designers looking for a better fit have tried on a variety of different strategies: Rodarte, Proenza Schouler and Altuzarra all fled to show during Paris Fashion Week, rather than New York. Rachel Zoe, Tommy Hilfiger and Tom Ford tried out Los Angeles. Thakoon went direct-to-consumer, and Rag & Bone and Mara Hoffman ditched the runway altogether.

All this see-what-sticks schedule shifting is indicative of the industry’s ongoing sea change: Customers are in charge, and the traditional fashion calendar, which prioritized wholesale relationships, is out of sync with their behavior. So the designers — more in charge of their own decisions, sales and destinies, thanks to digital and direct relationships with customers — are bucking norms and setting out on a path to debut new collections on their own schedules.

As designers look to make a more lasting impression on the runway with potential and existing customers, the confines, and the noise, of New York Fashion Week feel counterintuitive.

“We decided not to have a show after much back and forth, which I’m sure a lot of other designers are having right now, because it’s not the same clear path it was four or five years ago. Then, it was just what you do; you show at fashion week,” said Hoffman. “Now, it’s so jam-packed, and everyone is trying to have a voice at the same time. How do you stand out in that moment?”

Hoffman said the decision to nix the runway show altogether stemmed from one primary reason: It had become a time, money and energy suck that was all for show, not sales. Hoffman had to design pieces she knew would never sell, just so they would look exciting on the runway, which distracted her attention from her brand’s bread and butter: what the customers would actually end up buying.

As NYFW designers re-evaluate strategies, calendar shifts and monthly deliveries like Wang’s are taking over, in place of the see-now-buy-now movement, which was propped up as the next evolution of the fashion calendar. Wang said in a previous interview that, while the model was appealing, his company didn’t have the bandwidth to drastically overhaul its manufacturing and production schedule. Tying sales to a runway show that’s just a “blip” on a crowded calendar, as Hoffman puts it, is also a risky move.

“There have been so many changes to NYFW over the last few years, and everyone is focusing on their marketing efforts, to decide what works best for their business, as well as what enables them to serve their customer best,” said Rebecca Taylor, who stopped hosting a traditional fashion show in 2015. In its place, she hosts one-on-one guided showrooms with the press and buyers. “This has allowed me to take advantage of the moment and communicate the collection in a meaningful way.”

This season, Taylor will invite customers back into the fold by adding a consumer viewing for fans of the brand who want a sneak peek of what’s to come and to pre-order collection items. The production schedule itself hasn’t changed.

As fashion shows center more and more around the customer, brands that sell directly to consumers have figured out ways to work around the out-of-season fashion week model. Designer Misha Nonoo — who has hosted “shows” on social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, with items immediately available for purchase — said the glaring lag time between the time of a traditional fashion show and when it hits stores turned her off for good.

“If designers are increasingly opting out of the traditional wholesale model in favor of direct-to-consumer strategies, is Fashion Week now entirely redundant? The biggest problem is that we are serving the fashion industry, not the customer,” said Nonoo. “As a relatively early adopter of a direct-to-consumer model, I found myself searching for ways in which to minimize end-of-season waste. It seemed bizarre that clothing on shop floors was often out of sync with real-life seasons due to the traditional retail calendar.”

Nonoo has been testing on-demand manufacturing, a model that NYFW organizer the CFDA has recently adopted for designers, in partnership with production platform Nineteenth Amendment. The technology, which only launches the manufacturing cycle when an item is ordered, could land itself a starring role within New York Fashion Week, if designers continue to rethink the need for a traditional runway show.

For its part, the CFDA has tried to position itself as a resource for brands and designers who participate in New York Fashion Week. But that doesn’t change the fact that these designers are questioning the need for a show.

“I think there is more opportunity than ever for designers to reveal new product in non-traditional ways, according to their own schedule,” said Chriz Benz, the creative director at Bill Blass. “In some ways, the idea of a fashion show feels more European and traditional, anyway – perhaps a reason why those more reliant on this format have decamped abroad.”

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Here’s one light-hearted insight from Hawaii’s rather traumatizing incoming-missile scare this past weekend: It made people stop watching porn. Briefly. And then they really wanted to watch porn. Pornhub, a surprising leader in data visualization, crunched its traffic in Hawaii from the day of the false alert and revealed the results today. As one might…

Football, of both the professional and amateur variety, dominated the Nielsen Social Content Ratings for the week of Jan. 8. This past weekend’s four National Football League playoff games accounted for four of the top five spots on the sports chart, with the other going to the College Football Playoff National Championship game. The Minnesota…