Using Facebook Without Being Trapped In It

It’s a moving target when you’re talking about Facebook and its relationship with media companies.

In preparation for our June 13 webinar “Optimize, Monetize Your Facebook Strategy,” I’ve been speaking with our media CEO participants about their concerns and priorities with the platform. But even as we’re having those conversations, it’s against a backdrop of constantly new developments coming from Facebook.

Facebook added support on its Instant Articles platform for Google AMP and Apple News (a move that has implications in both its wars against those other platforms and a concession to Instant Articles’ struggles). It released a new tool, Audience Direct, that will help media companies sell video advertising on their owned-and-operated sites and apps in a more automated fashion.

Facebook also announced deals with Vox, BuzzFeed and other millennial-targeted news organizations to create long- and short-form video content for its upcoming video service. And its Facebook Journalism Project floated out a suite of new tools geared to helping users discover and engage with their local news organizations.

And that was all just last week.

The pieces on this chessboard are in constant motion. Facebook, chastened by post-election fake news woes, metrics problems and media company pushback, is presenting a new face to the media companies it has essentially acknowledged a greater dependence on.

It’s making concessions and building tools for those companies at a faster rate than ever. And this suggests a perceptible shift in the Facebook/media dynamic. No longer does the platform’s nature seem quite so monolithic and eclipsing as it was, say, six months ago.

Which isn’t to say that any media company is letting its guard down. As I spoke to Graham Media CEO Emily Barr, Raycom CEO Pat LaPlatney and Dallas Morning News CEO Jim Moroney last week, all were keen for the opportunity they’ll have on June 13 to engage with Facebook’s Jason White, manager of U.S. news partnerships.

White has become a much more visible and reachable face for the platform of late, meeting with newsrooms and showing more receptivity to their ideas than the company ever has historically.

We’ve got a lot to talk about together. Front and center is the key tension between Facebook and every other media company on its platform: Facebook wants to keep users inside of its walled garden as long as possible. Other media want to meet users there and engage with them sufficiently to pull them away to their own islands outside (with the exception of NowThis, OZY and other media companies that live — kind of parasitically — almost exclusively within Facebook).

Is it an irreconcilable dynamic? Obviously, no one in this equation can afford for it to be. But everyone is also still figuring out what they can live with, and they’re doing it on the fly.

Media companies continue to lay out resources to maintain a robust Facebook presence. Graham’s Barr, for instance, told me she’s had a 10-fold increase in digital staffing over the past five years, with a healthy portion of that going toward populating Facebook with content. The margins have been steady with a little growth in ROI over the last couple of years, she says, but it’s no gangbuster business. She’d prefer to carry users over to Graham’s owned-and-operated platforms for monetization opportunities.

The Morning News’ Moroney, meanwhile, tells me his endgame is converting Facebook traffic into paying subscribers. He says the discussion among publishers has evolved from merely how much traffic or page views sites are getting into how many of those visitors become digital subscribers.

For Moroney, no digital advertising schemes will ever trump paying subs. “There is now a growing consensus that digital advertising is never, ever going to pay for the journalism being done in local markets,” he says.

Like both Barr and LaPlatney, he’s interested in how Facebook might further help his own monetization goals. “How can I better understand who those people are and help them convert,” he says of his wish list for Facebook.

In our webinar, we’ll see what Facebook has to say about that. We’ll also delve into related concerns. Among them: How can Facebook open up further, more lucrative monetization opportunities? How can media maintain a vivid brand identity inside Facebook’s ecosystem (particularly as research shows a conflation problem there, especially among younger consumers)?

And how much does Facebook Live stand to change newsrooms, who have adopted it as ardently as they have cooled on Instant Articles?

Things have become much grayer than a Facebook-vs.-everybody dynamic. The interdependencies between the platform and the media have pulled into sharper focus, and our discussion will tackle that complexity.

As Barr says: “This is an ecosystem. If we were to let one part of the ecosystem get strangled and die, you’re just going to kill the whole thing.”

Michael Depp is TVNewsCheck’s special projects editor. His column on the nexus of old and new media will appear regularly. He can be reached at [email protected].