Facebook and the Future of Free Thought
The consumption of news -- that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples' lives -- could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that's not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That's bad for independent thinking and human free will.
If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world's news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.
On Monday we argued that Facebook's call to users to subscribe to news outlets on the social network could soon make it the world's leading news-reading platform. Hitwise picked up on that story and ran some numbers today. Their conclusion: Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the "news and media" category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%). Perhaps more importantly, though, Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites' total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN - portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.
So Facebook is the web's most popular subscription-enabled place to read news; be it from links shared by friends or by becoming a Fan of news organizations like Facebook is now encouraging. That doesn't mean that Facebook is yet a better news-reading service than dedicated RSS readers are. But it has certainly caught on as a way to read news far better than dedicated news-reading software has. In fact, it may offer the only meaningful chance that the technologies of online self-publishing and simple subscription are going to change the world like they ought to.
According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkins tonight:
Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site's traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular).
We detailed on Monday a number of ways in which Facebook was already the best place for millions of people to read and share news, but when looking at these Hitwise stats it's important to realize that it's traffic that's being counted. So full feeds inside Google Reader deliver the whole story, whereas Facebook snippets require that readers click all the way through to the source site. None the less, a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350.
Google News, the 2nd leading news reader according to Hitwise, made some nice changes this week around starring stories to track over time. That could increase its marketshare. But Do-It-Yourself subscription to diverse selections of news sources may be contrary to the contemporary human condition, as desirable as it may be. As web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman said in an unrelated post this week about the closed nature of the iPad: "The bulk of humanity doesn't want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works." The same could probably be said for news about the world, and look where it's gotten us.
I'm not saying Facebook is a better way to read news than through an RSS reader. I'm saying no one uses RSS readers, even after years of their being as obviously life-changing as many of us know they are. Instead, people are beginning to use Facebook to read news. That's good, because platforms that encourage independent subscription instead of just consumption of pre-selected news are very important.
Facebook Could Be Our Only Hope (Online)
The big story is of course that the vast, vast majority (like 95%) of traffic to news sites doesn't come from news readers like Google Reader, Google News or Facebook at all. It comes from search engines and portals. Google, Yahoo and MSN. That's what these numbers appear to indicate. Sure there's a long tail of other sites like Twitter, Digg, HuffingtonPost etc. but it's hard to imagine all those other sources at less than 1% each are adding up to much in aggregate. (We've asked Hitwise and await their response.)
Hitwise reported in September that of traffic leaving Twitter, for example, only 3.4% of it went to News and Media sites.
In other words, consumption of online news may not really have changed much for almost anyone in the last 10 years. You, dear reader who probably came here from Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook (maybe Digg if we're lucky), appear to remain part of a freakishly small minority.
That minority may be disproportionately powerful, driving market trends (maybe) and running circles around information streams online (definitely), but the experience of finding out news about what's going on in the world may not be a structurally different thing for almost anyone else, as it is for us.
That doesn't bode well for the long-tail of publishers, small voices given volume by easy publishing tools online. The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived - but no one is using them. Except Facebook, in growing numbers.
Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook - the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) - could be the web's best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.
So what are you going to do, Facebook? Are you going to move news about the world to an honored and important place on the site, are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription) or are you just going to post an occasional post to the company's blog about how you can use Facebook to subscribe to news feeds - through a tedious process?
I'm hoping Facebook will take this opportunity and encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family. That could deliver a tangible improvement to the world's information landscape, like the internet was always supposed to do.
Become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get all the most important web technology news and analysis delivered to you on the world's leading news consumption platform!
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
OK this actually makes sense to me dude I like it.
RT
www.web-privacy.cz.tc
Part of the draw of a newspaper is that it's full of (relatively) timely stories that you can search through and read when you want to. While I understand that sometimes news in real-time is best, it's not convenient to be in an always connected, always alert mode. For example, there are at least 8 hours each week day where I can't read RWW articles because I'm at work. When I get home and want to read RWW, sifting through twitter would be a very poor choice since there's so much fluff in the way. Moreso for facebook, as so much more real-time activity information is conveyed.
As seemed to be hinted RSS readers, though much less popular, are actually better for news consumption in cases where the user wants to follow a particular outlet or topic on his/her own time, not the publishing time. What would really "save" news consumption is not adding more junk to the unmanageable heap that is facebook, but to engage in efforts to expand knowledge of RSS readers. Yes, most people I know don't know even know what RSS is. But once I've explained it to them and shown them Google Reader they're almost immediately hooked.
Do you really think the unstable, noisy mess, try-to-do-everything-the-entire-internet-does-on-one-web-portal that is facebook is really going to improve news consumption? I think it'll just make consumption more haphazard. (fyi, I clicked through to this article from twitter.)
Mayby I missed this in your article, but while facebook might be where people consume content, and it might drive users to your content. I wonder if mayby the sorters of content, the people at the head of the wave are using tools like google reader. Like mayby the infovores use specialized tools like google reader.
Alex, I think you may be right to some degree. But becoming a Fan of news outlets on Facebook could become a much bigger think, that's what FB is starting to encourage. Facebook-as-RSS reader could happen and Facebook as news consumption platform in general already is happening. 350X as much as Google Reader.
Marshall, I take your point, but I just can't imagine facebook being the main point of consumption for uber-users. I guess you could think of it as the point of concentration. Even today I consume all my facebook stuff today in google reader, even if it comes from facebook.
Alex, you read Facebook via Google Reader? Surely there are less than 200 people on the whole internet who do that, right? ;)
For me personally in the past I added a few news sites to my facebook feed, but soon thereafter removed them. It simply cluttered my feed. When you add a site that is posting 20-40 articles a day it is just too much. Additionally friends that add too many links/articles I tend to hide. And there is without a doubt, an 'art' to know what and how often to share on Facebook.
This is all part of what I think is Facebook's ongoing public/private struggle. I am there to interact and share with my social circle. I am not there to look for aggregation of news and media. I have plenty of other methods that happen outside of Facebook to get my news.
Facebook (and even Twitter) will change the way the masses consume news. These service have popularized the stream. If nothing else, Facebook will have an influence on Yahoo!, MSN and other sources of traffic to news sites. We will see these portals display their news in stream format. It makes for a better reading experience online. Skim the headlines, find what interests you and click through to read the entire story.
RSS is too hard for the mainstream. Too clunky. Fanning or following is so much easier to understand.
Cheers,
Bill Flitter
Founder
Dlvr.it
good question: "are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription)"? - But the prospect of Facebook increasingly being the social and news window to the world for the masses, diverting ever more attention away from the open web, should concern (if not scare) us.
Posted by: LogEx
|
February 3, 2010 9:43 PM
Oddly, while I use Facebook pretty much 10-16 hours a day (I have a good excuse), I found this article from the fancy Fast Flip feature at the bottom of my Google News page.
Well, I did click through your Twitter feed to this post, Marshall.
I'm actually not surprised that Facebook is becoming the way people get their news. If now 57% of America is on Facebook, and the biggest growing group is people older than 40, it makes sense that they would get their news through Facebook links. And it's heartening to see that Kristof got 34 comments on his article.
It IS appalling that more people would choose not to read newspapers, or even go to newspaper sites, or even use feeds, when they are so convenient. If it makes you feel any better, I did teach about 60 people to use them last year, and I have two presentations on how to use RSS feeds for job searches on my website, http://wildwomanfundraising.com. One way to get people to use them is to show them how USEFUL they can be when trying to find a job in today's tough job market.
And I feel somewhat removed from all of this. As someone who committed Facebook Suicide not too long ago, I feel sorry that I can't see my friends on there anymore. But I do like going directly to huffpost, nytimes, motherjones, adbusters, the economist, and others for my news. Or go to my feeds. Apparently I am in the infinitesimal minority!
I love your call to Facebook to get news pages up. What do you think of the model, maybe as you login, like Yahoo, you can get the top headlines?
LogEx, my contention in this post is that Facebook is MUCH more open than the way 95% of people are getting their news on the web, through portals. You can subscribe to any damn thing you want on Facebook, or at least anything that has a FB Fan Page and almost everything does.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
|
February 4, 2010 1:22 AM
good question: "are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription)"? - But the prospect of Facebook increasingly being the social and news window to the world for the masses, diverting ever more attention away from the open web, should concern (if not scare) us.
Hi,
Many of Facebook's users are online and interacting with the site for hours each day and no doubt have a personal connection to what goes on there.They are my trade magazines, and while I'd never cancel my subscriptions, I am as guilty as most people of ignoring them. On the other hand, I never fail to read Tampa's major daily newspaper every morning (with coffee cup in hand) and monitor certain news websites...
What if FB were to display what its user base is linking to most on a given day? And we could filter that by our friends, people in our area, our field, etc.? The network as the filter.
Nice writeup, Marshall.
Facebook is where I get all my important news already - I know all the important things... like the weather and if anything has happened anywhere just based on my friends updates.
I see your point, but as you wrote it's early and there isn't a robust assortment of real news available yet. Business models, of publishers and Facebook, will complicate the free flow of full feeds. It may be too early to tell what the character of news reading on FB will be like, assuming the growth continues.
Posted by: LogEx
|
February 4, 2010 7:32 AM
Marshall I am such a fan of your writing. Commenting just to let you know. Keep it up... At least there is someone who doesn't write for the page views :)
Thanks Bilal. I would like to get more pageviews, to be honest, but you're right - this post didn't get very many. :) I think it's important none the less. Thanks for your support.
Maybe Tier 1 publishers, as they transform from content creators to content curators, can make the difference - http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com/2010/02/facebook-and-the-future-of-news/
And wrote some more on the Echo Blog :) http://bit.ly/9TyCfj
Hey Marshall,
You are probably right very few people read facebook via google reader, but I figured out how to do it by reading about another blogger who did this, so mayby more then 200 people but on the whole probably inconsequential.
I really do agree with all your points, and mayby my points are orthogonal to yours, but my point is that the people who start the hype. The people who sort throught the steam to find the gems that latter get posted to facebook, those people are probably using tools like google reader.
Because of this I think tools like google reader are super important, because they play such a big role in the ecology of the stream.
I personally have seen what you guys are talking about for awhile now. While I use google reader to sort and then share. I share to Twitter, facebok and my main webpage. I am seeing slowly overtime more views, and click throughs on sites like facebook, and twitter.
But without google reader, or someething like google reader I may not be as excited about sorting through large volumes of feeds.
Facebook appears to have taken the position that it is simply a platform, and that it's up to the developers and others to create content. Google also once took that stance, but we see now they are shifting a bit and acknowledging they have a role in the media that fills their servers. Perhaps Facebook will also make a similar transition, but for now has more than its hands full dealing with their massive scaling issues.
If you're interested in these issues, I run a group called Hacks and Hackers bringing together journalists and technologists and we're hosting a panel this month on personalized news. Check it out at http://www.meetup.com/hacksandhackers
Marshall, I typically like the stuff you write, but I'm confused. Why do you say things like "a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350" and "350X as much as Google Reader" when you explain yourself that the methodology is flawed? So you're saying that people who can only see article headlines click links 350 times more than people who are already reading the full article? Is that not surprising? Perhaps Facebook IS more popular for reading news, but I don't think this statistic can tell us very much about it.
That is, unless your point is that everybody else is also mis-interpreting this stat, so this is what is driving advertising dollars.
Chris, even in Google Reader, most of the sites that Hitwise is measuring here do not publish a full feed and also require clickthrough. I think it's very fair to assume that, as a rough estimate, Facebook is the way that 350X more people get their news than is Google Reader.
You write, "The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived - but no one is using them." and I agree with you ... kinda/sorta ... at a gut level.
But you know I think that's the potential magic of "many to many": so long as the long tail is substantial it can remain operative, in a symbiotic / non-linear / fractal sorta way.
When I say "tensegrity" how many folk think of Buckminster Fuller? how many think of Carlos Castenada? Those communities may be marginal, but I bet they have weight and influence beyond mere numbers.
Signal processing to separate data from noise is only step 1. "Data" ain't "information". That transformation calls for something more subtle; I coined the term "protension" i.e. information doesn't just want to be free, it wants to cohere and grow.
I think it all depends on what each person wants, and as the technology grows, we are all being opened up to whats possible by that technology.
Just because I can get the news on facebook, doesn't mean I want to read it. In fact, I'm trying to get away from the usual main stream news and find news, stories, that are more relevant to what I'm interested in.
It's interesting how people discover things and like myself have developed my own way of gathering and reading info.
It all started after I joined facebook and set up a fan page, (I WAS using google reader), on that fan page I set up Networked blogs and started to find and mostly add all the blogs I wanted to read.
Then I downloaded Flock browser which has RSS built into the sidebar. This is where I subscribe and sort through all my feeds (no more google reader). Flock also links to my blog, so i can grab a story, reblog it through networked blogs, it then spits out onto my fan page wall.
Bare with me here...
In this browser I can also, upload photos, videos and see that media stream across the top of the window (you can hover over the thumbnails and instantly grab html embed codes).
I don't bother to RSS any fan page wall... why? because the comments are not included and I rarely follow a link from my wall.
I'm more and more interested in what the whole community thinks about what they are reading. Yes... there's a lot of rubbish in facebooks news feed and yes you can just hide who you want to.
I always read through the browser sidebar RSS headlines, which when clicked show the full story inside the browser window (not the original blog but an aggregate) If I then click on THAT headline it takes me to the originating source.
...that's how I got here :)
If I like the blog and it's info I'll sub to the RSS if it's just a one off post I like, I'll just read and maybe join in the comments and sub those.
I agree, not a lot of people know how to use RSS or how useful it is. Most people on facebook wouldn't know the Wall has an RSS feed. Maybe follow and friend is the new RSS?
The funny thing about hiding people in your news feed. What if every one in your friend list hides you? Then your talking to no one.
Yes... I am a little nuts, but seriously, flock has made my social networking, blog reading and blogging and website building a hell of a lot easier.
Most people online just want the tech to be easy, they won't search, like us :) to find the best solution, they're just not that interested. We ARE the minority at the bleeding edge!
Paul