Can TV Stations Live With Facebook Live?

Facebook last year offered up to $1 million to choice media like Buzzfeed and celebrities to post video natively to Facebook Live, launching the feature with a bang. Coupled with Instant Articles, Facebook Live now gives users one more powerful reason not to leave the friendly confines of its service.

At the same time, the move has put broadcasters under increased pressure to follow newspapers and pureplay news sites in posting native content to the oversized social media site.

As that pressure mounts, they are weighing the pros and cons of ceding control over their content to a powerful third party with some 1.79 billion users, while calibrating the type and volume of content to share there. They are trying to measure the platform’s money-making potential against the outlay of resources it demands.

And lest they fall into the same existential dance that other media have, they are formulating strategies to decrease their growing dependence on it.

“People are using Facebook as their source of news, so we know we’ve got to be there,” says Matthew Straight, VP of digital for the Meredith stations. “But it makes me nervous, honestly, to work that closely with a platform you have zero control over and yet you feel is an ever-present force in the local news space.”

“It’s just a total shift in audience behavior,” says Jessica Pucci, a professor in the journalism program at Arizona State University. “Now that Facebook is so far beyond a chronological list of status updates, and it has really encroached into that TV space, ad-supported TV stations have to be choosy about what content they’re sharing where.”

Pucci’s own PBS newsroom at Arizona State University is one of the more liberal about letting content live natively there. “We’re a public station, not supported by advertising, so everything we produce for our broadcast, we share on Facebook,” she says. “We don’t hold anything back.”

What Facebook Wants, It Gets

Benjamin Mullin, managing editor for Poynter, has been tracking the newsroom shift from using Facebook solely as a promotional channel to creating content that will only be consumed natively on the platform. He says Facebook is now leading the dance.

“It’s really up to Facebook at this point — whatever they decide to prioritize, that’s what news organizations will have to catch up to,” Mullin says. “It’s predicated on the whims of Facebook.”

Those whims keep Eric Bright, VP of e-commerce at Salt Lake City’s Deseret Digital Media, up at night. “The problem is that they keep asking us [the media] to do these things and then they switch the rules of the game,” he says. “And I understand why they do it. They have a consumer base that is telling them how they want to interact with their product. But what about our consumers?”

Catherine Badalamente, VP of digital media at Graham Media Group, likens the new dynamic with Facebook to the early days of cable and imagines asking broadcasters “to give away all their commercial pods because you should be so happy with growing your audience. That would never have happened.”

The Monetization Factor

Newsrooms looking to make revenue off native Facebook content have options: mid-roll videos in Facebook Live video, video and carousel ads in Facebook Instant Articles and various forms of native advertising.

With those options, Steve Baron, head of product for Tribune Media, believes he can make money by leveraging  20 million followers from across the company’s sites and an active presence on Instant Articles.

“We were one of the early partners on Instant Articles, which is a product that we can make money by selling directly ourselves, or let Facebook help fill the inventory,” he says. Publishers keep 100% of the revenue for ads they sell themselves on the platform, while they keep 60% when Facebook sells them.

The Canadian public broadcaster CBC is a fairly heavy user of Facebook. In fact, it now produces a daily news program, The National, for Facebook Live. Yet, Olivier Trudeau, senior director of distribution and partnerships, says he is careful not to become too dependent on it. “It’s very fragile positioning to put everything [we produce] into the Facebook platform. … We need to have a diversified strategy.”

In a Digiday article, Oliver Lewis, head of digital for News UK, says he’s “confident that Facebook Live can yield meaningful revenue for publishers in the future.” News UK is one of the few publishers not among those with video contracts that are reporting measurable revenue from Facebook.

Michael Fabac, director of news and marketing at News-Press & Gazette, a small broadcaster and newspaper publisher, also views the social network as more friend than frenemy.

“We have the mindset that that we are still the providers of the content, and [Facebook] is a terrific avenue to help our content get out,” he says. “We basically wiped the slate clean about a year ago, and invested in a strategic meeting where we brought all our news directors, our digital content directors and our promotion managers together and came up with some tactical plans.

“Now that Facebook has made it more profitable, we want to experiment even more with producing content specifically for the platform or as a tail to what we’re putting on the main site.”

And that jury’s deliberations may be further complicated by news last fall that Facebook, which has a preference to grade its own homework in terms of internal metrics, had been overestimating its video metrics for the last two years.

While the development didn’t have a demonstrable impact on ad sales, it did reinforce wariness among marketers, increasing calls for third-party validation.

Facebook remains a powerful source of online referral traffic for broadcasters. NP&G, for instance, gets 40% of its traffic from Facebook. Graham Media sees referrals of 30%-40% on average, and Raycom’s numbers range between 25% and 60%.

But this is a case where more is not necessarily better, says Glen Hale, director of digital content at Raycom Media. “If we have a station in that 60% range, that means they’re really very dependent on a source of audience that they don’t have control over.”

That lack of control can be especially worrisome when Facebook makes an algorithm change as it did last summer, and news sources got lower priority on users’ news feeds behind posts from friends and family. And if publishers ramp up their activity in Instant Articles, it can proportionately impact their own site traffic.

“I have heard stories from peers of sizeable drops in overall site traffic after launching Instant Articles and the consequences to sales and ad inventory because of it,” Badalamente says.

An Evolving Relationship

Keeping one eye on Facebook is something Raycom’s Hale thinks everyone in the industry should be doing. “It’s one of those things where Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla, the behemoth, and really whatever they decide to do, and where they want to take their business” is important.

Brodie Fenlon, the CBC’s senior director of digital news, says managing content is a matter of constant calibration based on some core guidelines.

“We aim to carry Facebook Live on big news moments such as speeches, police updates or live ‘scenes,’” he says. “For native video, we’re more selective and look for the best, most shareable video from within our system, usually with the goal of getting the story out to a larger audience through reach.”

“It’s a balancing act to make sure we maximize our exposure [on Facebook] while still maintaining strong owned-and-operated platforms,” CBC’s Trudeau adds.

Adam Symson, chief digital officer and incoming CEO at E.W. Scripps, is experimenting with content volume on Facebook in different markets. “I have less of a religious feeling about living on or off our platform and more of a secular feeling about monetization,” he says.

Symson likes the fact that Facebook has jarred broadcasters out of their complacency, breaking up their one-to-many headlock of news delivery. “To me, it’s an amplification tool,” he says. “I don’t spend a whole lot of time crying in the corner about the success of another platform. It’s our job to figure it out.”

“It’s something we know we have to do, and it’s not necessarily ideal,” says Meredith’s Straight. “Facebook is not going away, so we have to move beyond how we feel about it emotionally, and are trying very hard to work smartly with them.”

Additional reporting by Michael Depp.

This story originally appeared in TVNewsCheck’s Executive Outlook, a print publication devoted to the future of broadcasting. Read the other stories in the Winter 2017 issue here. Subscribe here.