What the shift to Facebook video means is that Facebook is more interested in hosting the things media companies make than just spreading them, that it views links to outside pages as a problem to be solved, and that it sees Facebook-hosted video as an example of the solution.
.. As a creator, you should be conscious that people will discover your video in News Feed next to a photo from a friend or a status update from a relative. Your video needs to fit in, and it needs to be something that your audience will want to watch and share.
This is a concise and honest assessment of what you do when you attempt to “promote” anything on Facebook: You are entering it into a direct contest—for attention and action—with everything else that people post to Facebook.
.. The words “publish” and “publisher” do not appear once in the January post; the word “creator” is not used in the December post. Was there a meeting? Maybe!
The Next Internet Is TV
The only thing that keeps people coming back to apps in great enough numbers over time to make real money is the presence of other people. So the only apps that people use in the way publications want their readers to behave—with growing loyalty that can be turned into money—are communications services.
.. They begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally, than before. Eventually they might even symbolically close their websites, finishing the job they started when they all stopped paying attention to what their front pages looked like.
.. They will be given new metrics that are both more shallow and more urgent than ever before; they will adapt to them, all the while avoiding, as is tradition, honest discussions about the relationship between success and quality and self-respect. They will learn to cater to the structures within which they are working and come up with some new forms. Some of what worked in print didn’t work on the web; some of what worked on the web didn’t work on social media; some of what worked on social media won’t work in these apps. (If you think Facebook had a distorting effect on news as a merereferrer, just wait until it’s a host.)
.. In this future, what publications will have done individually is adapt to survive; what they will have helped do together is take the grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet and consolidated them into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry.
.. If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I’m looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and “publications” are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?
Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
The most consequential journalism becomes just another unit of content in a single stream of music videos, movie trailers, updates from friends and relatives, advertisements, and viral tidbits from sites adept at gaming fast-changing algorithms and behaviors. Readerships that seem large now will turn out to be as ephemeral as Snapchats.
“I think John tends to be ahead of these things because he reads them as science fiction of the present,” Buchanan says. “That’s a lot of what The Awl does now,” Herrman agrees. “Our entire economy is just a giant science fiction writing prompt.”
.. Soon cities will be stratified into classes of on-demand laborers, Herrman says, “app playgrounds” zoned by service radii. It’s going to get more interesting when you replace those people with robots, Buchanan says, adding that everyone will be eating soylent while the rich eat solid foods in surge-priced restaurants.
.. He writes with the tone of an anthropologist studying the bewildering behaviors of the content industry: the “sacred ritual” of embedding John Oliver clips that every site performs on Mondays ..
.. Publications like Upworthyand spammier clones grow rapidly using formats tailored for Facebook’s News Feed, only to plummet with every opaque tweak to the platform’s algorithm.
.. Herrman later says of the shift to platforms. “If in the process of adapting to it you also lost track of what you were intending to do, then you are just an instrument attached to someone else’s machine, this little weirdly adapted thing that will be disposed of once someone gets around to fixing it.”
.. People share content that confirms something they believe or that they want people to believe about them. More arbitrarily, certain forms thrive according to the changing metrics of Facebook’s algorithm: time spent off site, or comments.
.. Insofar as the site had any kind of founding principle, it was that writers should only write about things they care about and not waste readers’ time. Its motto was “Be Less Stupid.” Would it make readers smarter? Vanity Fair asked Sicha at the time. “I realized that we just don’t really want any stupid people reading it — which sounds mean, but they have plenty of reading material already,” Sicha said. “I want to disinvite them.”
.. Sicha’s first paycheck warranted a column by the late David Carr, who joked that if you were going to launch a site, you’d look at everything The Awl did — its hard-to-pronounce name, its eclectic mix of content, its literate but minuscule audience — and do the exact opposite.
.. Ortberg compares him to Tom Bombadil, the friendly magical being from Lord of The Rings who’s immune to the ring’s warping power. “A lot of folks who work in media are like, ‘God, I have to carry the ring. Doesn’t this suck?’ We all have to have the same fights. Tom Bombadil is… kind of untouched by all of it. He puts on the ring and doesn’t care. He’s just leaping around the woods merrily being like, ‘I own myself. I own these woods. No one can harm me.’ That to me is kind of Choire. He will choose what parts of the conversation he’s going to engage in, and he’ll choose how to talk about it, but you can’t make him do it.”
.. The Awl makes a virtue out of its narrow audience when talking to advertisers, calling their readers “indielectuals,” a term coined by former publisher John Shankman and which Sicha uses with an exaggerated shudder. According to Sicha, 29 percent of the site’s readers have graduate degrees.
.. If the content apocalypse comes, Herrman is cautiously optimistic that The Awl will survive it. “We’ll be the cockroaches who don’t die but who are and will remain cockroaches,” he says, laughing.
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