Data-Labor-Technology

January is an interesting month for storytelling. At the outset you have the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This annual behemoth of a conference has traditionally focused on products and gadgetry. Notably, as computing power steadily increases and the promise of 5G connectivity floats tantalizingly on the horizon, brands will increasingly have…

Sony’s free, ad-supported streaming service Crackle will rebrand as Sony Crackle this spring, the outlet announced at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. The new name will allow Crackle–make that Sony Crackle– “to lean into the power of what Sony stands for,” Eric Berger, GM for Crackle and evp and chief digital officer for…

When a show is as big as of a commercial and critical hit out of the gate as The Handmaid’s Tale was last year–the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning drama was also one of Hulu’s most-viewed shows in 2017–it sometimes goes off course in Season 2 as its creators try to lean into the hype. But…

Hulu continued its dual approach of bulking up both its original and acquired series slates by announcing two big coups today: The company has landed exclusive streaming rights to the hit medical series ER–which turned George Clooney into a megastar two decades ago–and has also snapped up Clooney’s next show, a limited series adaptation of…

Publishers have been working to reduce their dependence on the giant social platform, a trend that’ll likely accelerate now that Facebook says it will prioritize users’ posts over publishers’ in the news feed.

To protect against what’s been an ongoing decline in referral traffic, publishers have been adding new social distribution channels, investing more resources in existing ones and beefing up internal tools that deepen the relationships they have with existing users.

And while publishers that were overwhelmingly dependent on Facebook show less interest in diversifying their traffic, every publisher contacted for this story sees a major shift coming.

“The stuff that may lose distribution is not stuff publishers are monetizing currently,” said Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer, referring to news feed video that became a huge source of frustration for publishers last year because it hasn’t monetized well. “All publishers are still trying to find a sustainable, scalable business model in Facebook. Without some big changes, we’re not going to get there.”

The Daily Beast, which according to SimilarWeb analysis gets more social traffic from Reddit and Twitter than Facebook, is putting more effort into Flipboard to build traffic inside the app and also drive users directly to its site. Since it began working with Flipboard directly two months ago, it’s nearly doubled referral traffic from there, pushing it past Facebook as a referral source.

“We’re significantly less reliant on Facebook than our competitors, thanks to a strategic choice to remain as diversified as possible,” said Janaki Challa, the Beast’s director of audience growth.

Facebook remains Bloomberg Media’s largest source of social referral traffic, according to SimilarWeb, but the business publisher sees opportunities to broaden its reach. Bloomberg Media distributes its content across 10 platforms, and it recently joined Line, the messaging app that’s most popular in countries including Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia; it’s also considering moving onto Telegram, the mobile messaging app that’s popular in countries like Iran, said Meena Thiruvengadam, Bloomberg’s global head of audience engagement.

Other publishers like Gizmodo Media Group are focusing on bolstering traffic from their existing audiences.

For publishers that rely on Facebook for a large majority of their traffic, there are fewer moves to make. “There is no other platform on the planet that can drive traffic like Facebook, nor is there one on the horizon,” said one executive at a publisher that gets 90 percent of its traffic from Facebook.

For that executive, who asked not to be identified, the changes announced last week will have a clear effect on the way they use Facebook. “Our use of the platform will take a much harder edge toward generating discussion,” that executive said. “Rather than just letting comments run amok, we’ll be more active in asking leading questions and leading readers into discussions to create the types of engagement Facebook is asking for.”

While few publishers sounded as optimistic about the changes off the record as they sounded on it, some pointed out that Facebook’s move may help publishers move on from strategies that weren’t netting a ton of revenue in the first place.

“We’ve always preferred a direct relationship with our users, and we’ve always prioritized that, though this does add a certain urgency to that,” said Warren St. John, the CEO of local news publisher Patch, which counts Facebook as the third-largest source of referral traffic, after email and Google.

The post Publishers, already shifting dependence from Facebook, are expected to accelerate that in wake of news feed change appeared first on Digiday.

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