What is fascinating is to see FB successfully employ the same general strategy to publishers as they did advertisers.
With advertisers, they got everyone excited about the ability to reach their audience through a new channel. It had some similarities to email in that FB encouraged you to get Likes on your page, and then everything you posted would in theory reach your audience. Then they gradually tightened the screws in the name of declining user experience with too much garbage in the feed, which became algorithmic instead of sorted by recency.
This in turn let them flip the switch and move to basically zero reach unless you pay. And not just pay a flat rate based on however thousands of users you have (like email providers), but a dynamic pricing auction that maximizes revenue for FB. So advertisers invested all this time and major dollars on building their FB base, without actually owning the contact info or the ability to reach those people without paying FB. Frog successfully boiled.
Now with publishers they got them all excited about the reach they get for their content, and then slowly choke them via Instant Articles. Since publishers are so reliant on the revenue from FB, they have ZERO leverage in these negotiations, much like when Google says "sure, you don't have to have your content indexed." FB can now decide how benevolent it is feeling towards publishers, and there's nothing they can do about it.
With advertisers, they got everyone excited about the ability to reach their audience through a new channel. It had some similarities to email in that FB encouraged you to get Likes on your page, and then everything you posted would in theory reach your audience. Then they gradually tightened the screws in the name of declining user experience with too much garbage in the feed, which became algorithmic instead of sorted by recency.
This in turn let them flip the switch and move to basically zero reach unless you pay. And not just pay a flat rate based on however thousands of users you have (like email providers), but a dynamic pricing auction that maximizes revenue for FB. So advertisers invested all this time and major dollars on building their FB base, without actually owning the contact info or the ability to reach those people without paying FB. Frog successfully boiled.
Now with publishers they got them all excited about the reach they get for their content, and then slowly choke them via Instant Articles. Since publishers are so reliant on the revenue from FB, they have ZERO leverage in these negotiations, much like when Google says "sure, you don't have to have your content indexed." FB can now decide how benevolent it is feeling towards publishers, and there's nothing they can do about it.