Hit me with your algorithm stick: How Facebook is taking aim at paid-for content

FACEBOOK has dealt a serious blow to paid-for content creators by introducing a big change to the way its newsfeed algorithm works.

I've written briefly in previous blogs about how the site decides on what we all see in our newsfeeds - this includes giving ratings to the things we click on, and the stories our friends have viewed before.

But the latest change means it doesn't just register what we click on - it also registers how long we stay there.

This means that if you click on a link on your newsfeed and stay on that site for along time, you are even more likely to see more from that site in your feed later. If you just click and return to Facebook straight away you will see a lot less of that site's stories in future.

The measure is designed to discourage 'click-bait' style stories that don't deliver on the promises they make. Often cheap, ad-heavy sites will employ click-bait tactics to get users to click, then just bombard them with ads once they've navigated there.

So far, so good. After all, who wants to see loads of crappy links in their feeds?

Unfortunately, the new measures have had some negative consequences.

Facebook has essentially taken aim at paid-for content sites, just at a time when the media is struggling to work out ways to fund itself.

Many people are seeing their reach - or, number of people who see their posts - decrease

To fully understand the problem, you have to look at the situation from a paid-for website's point of view.

If your content is not free, then a large number of the people that click through to your stories from Facebook aren't likely to stay there very long. You are relying on much smaller numbers to subscribe to read. But, of course, to get those small numbers of subscribers, you need a large number of clicks.

So if increasingly smaller numbers of people are staying - or 'dwelling', as it's often referred to - on your site, the new changes mean you will find the number of users who see your posts goes down dramatically.

These changes work really well for providers of free content, as their slice of the readership pie will continue to increase. Aggregator sites who employ relatively few journalists, like the Huffington Post, and other small, lean operations like Buzzfeed provide all their content free.

The changes benefit free sites like Buzzfeed. LOL.

The BBC too is of course free, and will be taking an increasing interest in social media in the next few years.

But the bigger newspapers, who employ lots of people and undertake far more traditional investigative journalism will suffer more and more unless they commit to keeping their content free.

Many will - The Mail, The Mirror, The Guardian and The Independent are all still free. But all are seriously struggling to make ends meet.

It's a tricky problem, but one that Facebook should take seriously. The majority of online advertising money now goes straight to Facebook and Google. So if they aren't careful, Facebook could end up cutting off readership from paid-for sites AND ad revenue from free sites.

Facebook now dominates the market in terms of online ad revenue

If that happens, all content providers will have less money to invest in good quality articles. It would mean that either people migrate away from Facebook (encouraged to do so by increasingly angry news sites) OR Facebook's dominance makes this impossible and the quality of web content just gets worse.

Neither is desirable, but Facebook aren't stupid. I expect changes to come sooner rather than later - not least because many of the big media organisations that own these sites invest a great deal of ad money in Facebook themselves. The threat to cut it off could prove decisive.

The incentive is clear, the solution less so.

Chat's Life - inspiring conversation with graphics on social

CONVERSATION is the spice of online life, and we social media managers are always looking for ways to get people talking.

I'm luckier than most - because I work at a national newspaper. That means there is usually plenty of interesting, provocative content to get our followers going. 

Original graphic: Simple, but effective

But a simple question written into a tweet with no image and no context is likely to get ignored by most people, regardless of how great the story is. 

On our team, we decided that wouldn't do - we needed to make the question itself more engaging.

So here's what we did.

The Sun's website had been running "Have Your Say" articles for some time, and we thought it would be a good idea to try to translate this concept onto social media. 

Roxanne: This was my first go at making a graphic. Unfortunately, I saved it as a jpeg (rather than png)
file so the text looks a bit wobbly. But it still had a great response from followers

The first - and most obvious - thing to do was create a hashtag from the title. This would give continuity to our feed and mean regular readers would come to expect the #HaveYourSay tweets.

Baby steps: The drop shadow is improved on this one and the hashtag reads better

We then started to work on some ideas for graphics. The hashtag itself on a Sun red background in a Sun font was the first idea, which worked OK - but I thought we could have a bit more fun with it. 

Big head Barlow: If you've read my previous blogs, you'll know I find over-sized heads hilarious.
This is no exception.

So the next idea I had was to use a graphic (600x300 pix) which had the hashtag, a question and an picture from the story we were referring to. This would show the question and the context in one concise, eye-catching, shareable image.

Translucent juice: I had to cut out the beer from the middle of the glass on this one, then increase
the transparency so you can read the words through it. I think it works well.

We now try to do these as often as possible, and move the words and pictures around to keep it interesting. But, of course, the style (ie. colour and font) remain the same to give consistency to the concept, and to make it more recognisable.

Food for thought: I experimented with a larger picture on this with an added outer glow. The words
also have a black stroke, which I hadn't done on any of the others. I'm still undecided on whether
I like it or not. But it is certainly striking. 

What do you think? #HaveYourSay!

Stat's life

TWITTER is just a series of little information nuggets, and the best ones are filled with as much gold as possible. 

I have found that a great way to pack posts full of good content is to use images creatively and write lists onto pictures using photoshop. This essentially gives me an unlimited word count and allows our team to share large groups of factoids in a single tweet.

You see this technique used across all sorts of different subjects on twitter, with varying degrees of quality and success. They can range from cropped screen-shots of websites to professionally crafted graphic designs.

The 'record-breaking' season that led to David Moyes losing his job... http://t.co/VNnN6jxPK3 pic.twitter.com/PqLtM9ctnD
— The Sun (@TheSunNewspaper) April 22, 2014

Of course, the opportunity to have a much larger word count than Twitter would usually allow shouldn't be abused. Part of the reason for its success is that the 140 character format encourages users to be concise and clever about what they post. So with that in mind, I'm always keen to make the text in the pictures just as snappy as it would be in a tweet. 

In many ways, twitter encourages everyone to write like a journalist and cut out all the unnecessary words. These rules still apply.

An obvious area where stats and facts can be really effective is football reporting. Football fans famously love a good stat, and huge numbers of them (including myself) are active on Twitter.

The example above is one I created after David Moyes was sacked as Man United manager. It was a huge story, so very obviously a good story to follow up on. 

I made sure the background was Man United red by taking a screenshot of their website and pasting into photoshop, then using the eyedropper tool to get the correct shade. I then cut out a picture of Moyes to paste in and added a drop shadow onto the cutout image. 

After that, it was just a case of assembling the facts from various online sources, checking them, and writing them in around the image. I also made sure to link back to Sun goals digital service, as we are constantly looking to cross-promote social media and paid-for Sun content. 

As you can see, the post was retweeted hundreds of times. It also went on to become our most successful ever post on Google+. 

#SUCCESS