This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Deluding oneself into thinking Facebook "needs" them, when in actuality it's Facebook with 1000 times the power. Did anyone seriously believe this?
> Any publisher that is dependent on Facebook, or that trusts Facebook, is out of their goddamn mind.
I think it is okay to bootstrap this way, but you must have an exit strategy.
Eventually Facebook caught on that this was annoying and not a good use of the news feed, but if your business was dependent on it I imagine the effects were similar.
Having seen that happen before, building a company based on what Facebook decides to put in the news feed sounds insane.
Collect everyone's email address along the way? Then you might as well be an email newsletter business.
That doesn't necessarily mean "email newsletter business", it could be any of the number of ways businesses have tried to convert first impressions into continued engagement. The referral platform shouldn't particularly matter, really. Today's complaints about Facebook-driven traffic drying up are last century's complaints about Yellow Pages-driven phone calls drying up. How are you handling people after they arrived/called? What other avenues for referrals have you explored? There's a lot of business advice that I don't think has largely changed there anywhere near as much as the technology medium has.
I like email because it's one of the only "push" media that's both widely deployed and decentralized. (I once thought RSS would become that for the web, but it hasn't worked out that way.)
In any event, if you've been relying on Facebook to supply 75% of the traffic that goes in the top of the funnel, you're going to be having a bad day when that disappears. Even if the funnel is great.
As an RSS fan (and still an active user), I do agree that one of the prime failings here was that publishers in general too strongly backed the Facebook horse instead of, say, training users about the advantages of RSS. But yeah, why do the hard work today when you can wait for the rug to pulled out from under you by a third party and then do the hard work anyway?
Wow, that's adorable
What's wrong with you? Do you just not give a fuck about cats??
>“I think we need each other. We need them for the traffic; they need us for the content,” Mr. Speiser said on this week’s WSJ Media Mix podcast. “I think [Facebook] cares very much. I think without the content all these media companies are providing there’d be that much less reason to go on to the news feed.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-loves-publishers-says-...
Turns out no, I like my newsfeed better without all that content. The content I want to see on facebook is things that my friends post.