Mark Zuckerberg said in September that Facebook’s new sharing tools for music, video and news would “transform” the media world, with the social network “rethinking the whole way the news industry works”.
A few weeks in, there are early hints he might be right. Music services such as Spotify and Deezer had shared 1.5bn “listens” as of last week, while Rdio has seen a 30-fold increase in new user registrations from Facebook.
But the transformation is not necessarily what Facebook’s founder or his new partners in the news industry might have expected. A surge of Facebook traffic to years-old stories may be forcing news sites to reassess the importance of, well, news.
The UK’s Independent and Guardian newspapers were among the world’s first publications to integrate Facebook’s “frictionless” or “seamless” sharing through the “Open Graph”, announced at its f8 event, alongside Yahoo News, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post.
After users grant permission to the publishers, Facebook shares a link to every story they read on the site or app with their friends, appearing in the news feed or real-time “ticker”.
For the Independent – which integrates Facebook sharing into its own site, rather than through an app like the Guardian – some surprising stories have gone viral.
Throughout this week, most or all of the “most shared” and, by extension, “most viewed” stories on Independent.co.uk have been from the late 1990s. Most are oddball stories with eye-catching headlines, including “Sean, 12, is the youngest father” (January 1998), “Eton pupil died in ‘fainting game’” (March 1999) and “Scotland’s ugliest woman honoured” (May 1999).
The new prominence given to “most shared” is driving the “most read”, and the recent redesign of independent.co.uk is a complicating factor. This is just a short sample of data. But there are indications that the same “Facebook effect” is happening at other sites, too: the Guardian has seen a similar phenomenon, although older stories are less prominent in the most-read column, perhaps because it has a much larger online readership.
The Independent has not made any special effort to promote its archive content and its team are somewhat mystified as to what originally surfaced these older stories. One theory is that they have arrived via search but been absorbed into Facebook through the seamless sharing, then passed around through a combination of sensationalist headlines and absence of a timestamp to indicate their age.
Whatever the reason, it’s a more sharply accelerated form of virality than the Independent – or indeed other sites – have seen from Facebook before, when users had to actively share, like or recommend a story for it to appear in their friends’ newsfeeds.
“With open graph, the potential for discovery is always there, meaning that every piece of content has the chance to be renewed and recirculated,” says Christian Hernandez, director of platform partnerships at Facebook. “The resulting traffic only aids in driving awareness of articles of the moment, as well as from the archive.”
While the Independent is perhaps an extreme example, its experience throws into relief Facebook’s growing importance for publishers, relative to search.
Newspapers in particular have come to see the huge amount of visitors referred by Google and other search engines as a double-edged sword. Extra eyeballs are welcome for sites reliant on advertising income, but search traffic tends not to stay for very long, providing only a limited value to advertisers. Rupert Murdoch may have toned down the anti-Google rhetoric at News Corp but the Times’ and Sunday Times’ paywalled stories are still largely hidden from the search index.
Early indications suggest that visitors from Facebook are more “engaged”, staying for longer, with a decent multiplier effect when they recommend to friends, and are more likely to come back.
But if all those people are arriving in unexpected places, that may mean they miss seeing the more valuable advertising; older stories in the “long tail” of a site’s content are often handed over to an external ad network.
“It raises some interesting questions about what a newspaper is,” says Ian Maude, internet analyst at Enders. “Once something is published on the internet, it’s there forever. Facebook is allowing people to somehow find old stories and once it gets into the ecosystem, the viral effects on Facebook are driving them up the charts… If it’s incremental usage and they’re able to generate ad revenue, it’s not so much of a problem.”
Another common frustration with Google is the impact of changes to its index algorithm, PageRank, which despite the search-engine-optimisation industry’s efforts remains something of a black box. Facebook has its own algorithm, EdgeRank, which (in conjunction with September’s addition, GraphRank) determines which items appear at the top of an individual’s news feed.
EdgeRank is based on many variables, including who Facebook thinks are a user’s closest friends and how many people have interacted with a piece of content.
One theory about the Independent’s sudden rush of traffic from Facebook is that it is due to a tweak in EdgeRank that has prioritised news stories over, say, Spotify tracks or status updates. Such fluctuations (and knowing Facebook’s fondness for multivariate testing, they’ll happen often) mean Facebook could be just as capricious a referrer as Google.
Whatever the cause and the consequences, the Independent – which has had some teething troubles with its new website – is happy to have the extra visitors. Since plugging into the open graph, traffic from Facebook has increased several times over.
Out of 8.6m total visitors (according to Comscore) to independent.co.uk, AppData shows a leap in monthly active users connecting it to Facebook from 350,000 to 810,000 in just the last week.
Even though it’s just a short case study, it’s a tantalising taste of the impact that open graph must be having on Spotify, Netflix and other early adopting partners.
“It’s very early,” says Mr Maude. “Facebook are just exploring things and trying things out, but it’s already having a big impact.”
