News sites will soon be “wire services” competing in social networks’ internal attention markets, writes Ezra Klein. Scary!
fast-forward three years. Imagine it’s not just distribution. Now every article has to work in the publishing systems built by Facebook, Apple, Snapchat, Flipboard, mobile app developers, and so on. Even if these systems are great — and, in many cases, they will be — they’re not all going to be the same. A lowest common denominator effect will set in quickly: The pieces with the highest possible audience will be the pieces that work across the most platforms. So it won’t make much sense to pump endless energy into innovative, custom articles. Why spend so much of your time on a piece or a format that will only be available to a fraction of your audience?
Left unmentioned in this predicted shift to “published at Facebook” is the …for fractional ad dollars part. Klein also writes that “it’s as cheap to publish 100,000 words as 100,” so he isn’t thinking about …and writers get paid, either. Even scarier!
John Hermann points out that traffic from social networks—the vast audience Klein dreams of acquiring—is different: it’s an illusionary audience, because it goes away the moment the social network stops sending it.
2014 was the year [websites] looked around at everyone else’s sudden success and became slightly less confident touting their numbers, because they all hit them by doing and talking about very similar things; 2015, when a single [item] can easily out-traffic a week of a site’s web content, is the year it’s becoming clear to everyone who these audiences really belong to … 2016 is the year we find out what the price of access will be.
Scariest! Would you like doom with your web fries? Doom it is, sir.