The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news.
So let’s recap:
- People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
- They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
- The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
I think I missed the boat here but at the same time, I’m glad I did. I have no doubt that this blog, my little space on the web would have 10-20K readers by now, possibly more compared to the 2-5K I have today (unchanged from 2011) if I had moved over to syndication on platforms owned by other people. Posting here and sending the post to Facebook, Medium, Twitter, etc probably would have meant more people read my writings but they’d also not really have any brand loyalty to this blog. Those people read things that come across their stream.They don’t opt in to your work by visiting your site. They’re the same people who love my Instagram photos of beer but never take 10 minutes once a month to visit my Flickr page. I don’t actually want those kind of readers especially if I have to put in work to syndicate to them.
Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News, this requires no extra work on my part after the 15 minute setup so I’ll do it. Establishing a social media presence on 10 different corporate owned properties just to post links to things I wrote and interact with people in comments & @ replies is too much work.
The fact that people get all of their news on Facebook is scary. Why? Because you’re only going to see things from people you are friends with. I won’t get the entire picture. If I want to learn about what all sides think of a proposed law, I research it and read multiple sources. If I just go by the opinions of people in my social circle, I’ll never learn anything. Unfriending your die-hard republican friend actually makes you more close-minded.
Further, as we consumers relinquish control of our consumption to apps and walled-gardens, we give up more of our privacy. I’d prefer to independently read and write than do it within a bubble that I don’t own.