Brooklyn publishers react to idea of going Facebook native

Brooklyn-based media companies have mixed takes on the idea of publishing content directly to Facebook, according to interviews conducted by Technical.ly Brooklyn.

A lot of ink got spilled last week around rumors that Facebook is trying to move more and more of other publishers’ content into its walled garden. It’s all just at the idea phase right now, but what’s known has been covered first by The New York Times (more media oriented) and Wired (more business oriented).

Apple has made major news organizations feel comfortable putting all their content into apps; can Facebook pull off the same thing?

As both stories say, most publishers will tell you that the bulk of their traffic comes from posts to Facebook. In a way, Facebook has become everyone’s homepage.

These reports describe plans to make Facebook even more central to today’s media landscape.

The Times story explains how the social media giant has been going to publishers and talking to them about the idea of publishing more of their work directly to Facebook (the story describes it as a “listening tour”). The idea is that, for readers, publishing complete work straight to Facebook will be a more seamless experience. That is, no need to bounce from your Facebook app over to your phone’s web browser. Plus, Facebook is saying it will share the ad revenue that comes from the hosted content.

So, we went to some Brooklyn-based media outfits and asked them what they thought about the idea of sharing revenue with Facebook and publishing natively to the platform.

• Chris Lavergne, publisher of Williamsburg’s Thought Catalog, could see both sides. “There are a lot of unknowns right now and speculation might be premature. Still, the key question for us is: Who benefits? Does hosting original writing directly on Facebook better serve consumers? If so, we definitely need to be open to the idea. It might hurt business, but with every change there are new opportunities,” Lavergne told us via email.
• Veken Gueyikian of Hyperallergic doubted it would fit his company’s larger publishing strategy. “We work very hard to run ads that our readers find relevant and valuable, and consider them to be an important part of the overall experience on Hyperallergic,” he said. “So syndicating our content to a 3rd-party platform which uses another set of ads is not something we’d likely be interested in.” Gueyikian runs a second, related company, an art oriented ad network, called Nectar Ads.
• Noah Rosenberg of Narratively said he understood why publishers were hesitant, but compared the idea to YouTube, which is also sort of a separate channel but also empowers sharing content and also shares revenue. His take: “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve only reached a fraction of our potential audience, so the more opportunities we have to engage users and create an impact, the better. If Facebook is interested in facilitating that goal and helping us monetize our content in the process, it’s definitely something we’re interested in learning more about.” We covered Narratively’s expansion to L.A.

One other aspect of the news around Facebook came in an excerpt from Facebook’s recent earnings call, quoted in the story from Wired, where the company’s CEO said that video is going to be a very big priority for the site moving forward. In fact, Facebook apparently has some kind of deal with Lionsgate Films to publish some original content exclusively to the site, according to Wired. So we reached out to one local company that facilitates distributed distribution of film and video online, VHX.

• Alexandra Marvar had a hard time believing that noisy Facebook would be a good space for watching a movie. However, she wrote us, “All that said, VHX champions ubiquity as a strategy for internet distribution and if VHX filmmakers and content creators feel the Facebook interface would be a great place for their work to be absorbed, add it to the digital pile.”

Also at play here is a general wariness of Facebook’s growing power. The fickleness of internet users may be enough to check that, but who knows? Thought Catalog’s Lavergne spoke to this with another comparison to a leading tech company that may make the concept seem somewhat less ominous. “Apple has made major news organizations feel comfortable putting all their content into apps,” he wrote. “Can Facebook pull off the same thing?”