Only Fools Take Media (or Web) Advice From Social Control Media Moguls or From GAFAMonopolies
'Dumb fucks...' (to reuse the words of Mark Zuckerberg himself; Facebook looks after Facebook, not after publishers, and GAFAM protects itself and its monopolies/monopsonies)
A new report that we've already included in Daily Links is entitled "Media Companies Have Slashed Over 20,000 Jobs In 2023". It highlights the extent of the problem and illuminates what's behind the news deserts and lack of journalism online - a subject we wrote a great deal about throughout 2023.
One friend reminded me of a factor in this demise of the media. There were a small number of articles a good while back about how Mark Zuckerberg had suckered media companies into dropping print and written material and focusing on video instead. The numbers didn't pan out because Zuckerberg had lied, so because of those lies the media companies had wasted all their money on useless videos and fired their writers. With no money, they let even the video makers go and had nothing to re-hire the writers with even if there were any who had not already moved on to new jobs [1, 2, 3, 4]. We suppose the phrase to search for is "pivot to video"; it's only one of several video-related scandals.
How many publications were killed off this way? The numbers affected were clearly in the thousands, one person estimates. But no single article has summarised that, yet. Some basic stats might estimate the full number.
From our next "Freedom of Press" section (of Daily Links, due again some time this afternoon):
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Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 2
But the evidence that Facebook lied came out too late. The lumbering executive minds of great lumbering companies had already been made up. Print reporters were laid off en masse, and many of those who survived were pressured to spend less time messing around with icky, unprofitable words, and more time on making fun little videos.
And like many millennials who had once dreamed of reporting careers, I watched the bloodbath and regretfully decided that I wasn’t going to bother with pursuing another full-time journalism job either.
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How Facebook’s Chaotic Push Into Video Cost Hundreds of Journalists Their Jobs
Facebook egregiously overstated the success of videos posted to its social network for years, exaggerating the time spent watching them by as much as 900 percent, a new legal filing claims. Citing 80,000 pages of internal Facebook documents, aggrieved advertisers further allege that the company knew about the problem for at least a year and did nothing.
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Facebook’s pivot to video didn’t just burn publishers. It didn’t even work for Facebook
The layoffs were preceded, just a month earlier, by an announcement from Vice that it would “reduce the number of old-fashioned text articles on Vice.com, Refinery29 and another Vice-owned site, i-D, by 40 to 50 percent,” while increasing videos and visual stories on Instagram and YouTube “by the same amount.”
It all feels very five years ago. As we’ve documented, starting around 2016, Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg began pushing the notion that news video on Facebook was publishers’ bright future, a “new golden age.”
It turns out that the metrics that Facebook was using to measure engagement with news video were wrong, massively overestimating the amount of time that users spent consuming video ads. In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with those advertisers, paying them $40 million (while admitting no wrongdoing). But it was too late for the publishers who’d already pivoted to Facebook video and then either made big cuts or shut down completely when it turned out people weren’t actually watching.
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Vice Media plans to go deeper into video and other visuals as it targets a younger audience.
Van Scott, a Vice Media spokesman, said the company will reduce the number of old-fashioned text articles on Vice.com, Refinery29 and another Vice-owned site, i-D, by 40 to 50 percent.
The number of visual stories, including videos suited to mobile-friendly formats like Instagram’s Stories feature, is likely to increase by the same amount, Mr. Scott said.
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Was the Media’s Big “Pivot to Video” All Based on a Lie?
If the company did hide its mistake, as advertisers have alleged, it may also be responsible for the upheaval in the media industry that followed—including a huge number of layoffs. The infamous “pivot to video,” as it was known, began around 2015, and primarily swept the ranks of millennial-focused media companies. That was the year NowThis announced it wouldn’t have a homepage, and would solely publish clips to social-media platforms. Business Insider took the same tack when it launched Insider that same year (the site now has its own homepage). Moreover, in accordance with Zuckerberg’s 2016 declaration that the future of Facebook was video, many companies began to reshuffle their editorial strategies: MTV News, Vice, Vocativ, Mic, and Mashable all had layoffs in 2016 and 2017 as they announced plans to cut staff and pivot to video. (At one point, Facebook paid media companies to produce video for its site, though it eventually killed the initiative.)
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A New Facebook Lawsuit Makes 'Pivot to Video' Seem Even More Shortsighted
"A lot of friends lost their jobs over this bullshit," tweeted Benjamin Bailey, a writer for Nerdist. "Facebook outright lied and pushed this whole 'pivot to video' narrative. It's all a big house of cards."
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Facebook Admitted That It Was Inflating Video Metrics. Now a Lawsuit Says the Problem Started Much Earlier—and Was Way Worse
Now, those claimants have filed an amended complaint. The earlier court proceedings allowed them to review around 80,000 pages of internal Facebook records, and the plaintiffs said Tuesday that they had uncovered evidence showing Facebook knew about the miscalculated metrics all the way back in January 2015.
The plaintiffs also said the inflation of the metrics ran to 150-900%, not 60-80%.
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Facebook was caught lying to advertisers (again)
Antitrust expert Matt Stoller notes that Facebook has already been busted on 2 separate occasions for lying to advertisers:
“Pivot to video”: In 2016, Zucky McClaims told the world that Facebook was going all in on video, and it misled advertisers about video metrics to boost the program.
Measurement tool: At the end of 2020, Facebook told advertisers that its “conversion lift tool” (which measures ad performance) overestimated campaign results.
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Facebook employee warned it used ‘deeply wrong’ ad metrics to boost revenue
It’s not the first time Facebook has been accused of hurting businesses by inflating its numbers. The company previously faced a suit that claimed it greatly and knowingly overestimated how much video users were watching — an error critics say pushed online media publications toward a doomed “pivot to video” strategy, resulting in layoffs and enervated newsrooms. Facebook settled that suit in 2019.
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The data does lie: how Facebook’s fake video stats smashed NZ journalism
A lawsuit has revealed Facebook inflated its video statistics for years, inspiring the ‘pivot to video’ which made thousands of journalists redundant. Duncan Greive looks at its impact on New Zealand.
I can clearly remember that some years ago Facebook had another "video" scandal; in short, it was about them falsifying the number of video "views", giving a false impression of popularity to increase Facebook "addiction" (Twitter does the same thing). I saw many articles about it, then Twitter had a similar scandal and it had to settle this with shareholders circa 2-3 years ago, i.e. before Elon Musk and his autocratic friends blew money on it, only to discover that the longer they run Twitter (or "X"), the more money they will lose and the lower the "value" of the platform will become. It is a botfest. The valuation of the companies was (and still is) based on fraud.
Twitter and Facebook both fake their "reach" or "audience". They falsify their magnitude, tolerate bots, and intentionally misreport things like "impressions". Spamnil shows that YouTube is the same. This scammer does not want "guests" to know that well over 90% of his "views" are clickfraud. They're made to think he's some kind of YouTube 'star' when his videos barely get a dozen viewers.
There are many other bubbles and frauds out there. Don't put the eggs inside bubbles.
People who strive to become so-called 'influencers' within the confines of some mainstream media giants (or Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook etc.) are tying their destiny to that of another entity. Once they get dropped or the whole platform goes "bust" (Google+ was a high-profile cautionary tale) things deteriorate very fast for these 'influencers'. Their "friends" or "followers" of "fans" or "subscribers" or whatever are just some lists in somebody else's database, which is a privatised thing, both volatile and transient. It is only temporarily meaningful, albeit there's an online 'black market' selling these (in other words, gaming those databases for a fee because clickfarms aren't cheap to operate).
People should think ahead and think carefully. Do not follow others like cattle.
People must rethink old fashionable trends and buzzwords. They would be better off dodging all social control media and build their own thing.
Regarding videos, we've been deranked by Google for no apparent reason other than Google deciding to bolster the Google (YouTube) monopoly, in effect turning Google's "Video Search" into "YouTube Search". I've long said (for well over a decade) that relying on Google search (classic, "News", "Video" etc.) for traffic is a bad proposition that is not healthy. RSS is much better as there's no man in the middle, unless a state or an ISP decides to block/throttle an entire domain. That very seldom happens, or happens in repressive countries like Russia, not internationally (when Google kills your account it's dead in every country).
Here in this site we have made fewer videos in 2023 because it's time-consuming an activity and we prefer to record in 'batches'. We will cover this topic today or later this week, maybe in the form of video.
"Audio might be a compromise," I've been told, as "BSDNow moved from video to audio for a variety of good reasons and that has worked well for them."
We habitually link to BSDNow, which is a refugee of the cull by the (now) Microsoft-connected CloudGuru.
Video on the Web is fine, just use Free formats (as in, formats that Free software can play safely and easily) and make it not reliant on third parties. Better to have a video that not many people watch than to have a video removed - sometimes along with all other (innocuous but same author) videos - because of dirty politics, which may include libelous brigades, pressuring and lying to platforms, sometimes blackmailing them using sockpuppets.
Don't join "Gulags" like Google's YouTube. Move away. Liberate ideas. Make censorship hard/impossible.
"I just had a look at VICE's recently published videos on GulagTube," one person told me moments ago, "if that isn't fentanylware, I don't know what it is..."
Fentanylware is what we've dubbed TikTok as it suitably describes what it does to people in the digital realm, using (primarily) video. We've agreed among us to refer to it as Fentanylware whenever possible. █
"How dare the government intervene to stifle innovation in the computer industry! That's Microsoft's job, dammit." -MacAddict