Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Facebook faking viewership numbers is really an under-reported story. So many publishing companies had moderately successful business models. Then Facebook came along with their amazing viewership numbers. Everyone "pivoted to video", switched to targeting native Facebook views, and chasing those unbelievable viewership totals. The views ended up being well lower than reported which means the promising revenue never materialized like expected. By the time companies realized this, it was too late to pivot back to hosting their content on their own site because the behavior of their users had already been broken by Facebook. This destroyed countless publishers including CollegeHumor and the similar Funny or Die. It is amazing that Facebook only paid a $40m settlement for this fraud.

View on HN

Relevant Twitter thread from Adam Conover ("Adam Ruins Everything"):

https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120

An article about the settlement, including a link to the document itself: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-mi...

what I don't get is, if they saw a high number of views on FB with no actual revenue, why didn't they revert to their previous behavior of just sharing links?

Some of the revenue will have been CH directly selling ads (sponsorships, product placement, etc.) based on those inflated viewership counts.

... and that's the meta-story. "Ad-supported business models are fragile."

Do you have a better business model that has been proven to work for monetizing the kind of content CH made?

People won't pay for a subscription for that, people won't donate enough to keep the business afloat, and people don't actually want to use attention tokens/microtransactions.

A lot of people claimed that these alternatives work, but I've yet to see a business prove that they actually work.

Dropout, the CH thing that will keep running for 6 months or more despite all this, is subscription-based.

When I saw this article, I checked out. Sadly it was a mess that made it hard to find the CH content liked (such as the messages from CEOs skits). That may have been their roku app though.

Still, since that is how I consume content, and since they already laid everyone off, I cancelled my trial.

It's possible that for the kind of content CH creates, a better business model doesn't exist.

It's tough to make a living being a comedian. Especially in an era of deeply-interconnected communication where "everyone's a comedian."

What about licencing? Think of it like Star Wars but comes with free movie tickets and makes the money from merchandise and licensing characters/artwork etc. to businesses that actually sell things.

Not they aren't. Facebook and Google are advertising businesses, and two of the most valuable companies in the world.

Poorly executed business models based on faulty data and no clear profitability are fragile.

Facebook and google aren't ad supported in the sense that many content creators are.

They are ad platform providers which gives them a totally different position of power than 99% of companies out there trying to live on ad revenue.

They're exactly the same. They sell advertising space on their own websites and get attention by giving away free content and services. Publishers also buy each others tech and advertise on each others sites.

The business models are identical, just with vastly different scales.

They are platforms and content marketplaces (where the currency is attention). This is entirely different than run of the mill publishers that can't drive attention at scale.

Google and Facebook can leverage their power to put entire industries out of business.

Publishers also monetize attention. Scale is the only difference, the business models are the same regardless.

Also when these companies are selling ads instead of relying on native ads, some of the moves are made in anticipation of future revenue rather than based off current revenue numbers. It is just like a startup that touts active users over any revenue numbers. Once you have people's attention, monetization was generally assumed. A company might therefore move video to Facebook as soon as they consistently see that Facebook videos get 10x the viewership numbers compared to videos on their own site only to later realize that inflated viewership number was wrong.

Because, as one of the parent comments mentioned, it was too late. CollegeHumor's readers changed their behaviour because of FB's shady practices.

I am out of the loop, what were the Metrics that FB falsified? And how did they falsify them before the video was hosted on their site? Just trying to understand how their game numbers caused this post, and I can’t seem to make it connect.

Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything guy) tweeted a good thread that explains this: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120

If I read this correctly I'm not the only one who shys away from video content?

If this is the fact, does that mean we can get plain text back?

Talking about an interesting side-effect about videos in social media in recent times is they've learned to put text (or captions) in their videos for people (because they might have sound off) which made it far easier for deaf people to understand them! For which I am glad, but I barely use Facebook these days at all - just messenger.com

FB's measure of views was dubious (3 seconds, even if the audio was off). So the #s looked great for them, but in reality the majority of views were just glimpses as people scrolled through their news feed.

I don't understand why publishers moved everything wholesale onto Facebook without doing some research

Why not put up a few videos and compare ad revenue? When it didn't add up they could just move back...

I assume facebook still pays for all views it counts, so there is no downside in terms of ad revenue for publishers.

They were selling their own ads based on Facebook's numbers, then had to refund advertisers when they found out the truth.

This is a good point, that Facebook decided to pollute their clients' revenue streams with fraud, and the clients had to pay the price for that.

That would have been the shrewd business move, and a sufficiently callous read of the entire situation can conclude "It's CH's fault for making a bad gamble without due diligence. Even a popular, publicly-traded company can run a scam or have a screw-up; history has examples."

I doubt most people agree with that read though.

When you can objectively measure results, you'll often find that the people making decisions in an organization aren't as competent as they seem. It's a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most of the people you have to take orders from didn't get to where they are through intelligence, hard work and character.

Reminded of this line from Margin Call:

"So, Mr. Sullivan, why don't you tell me what you think is going on here, and please speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever. I didn't get here on my brains -- I can assure you of that."

Hence "networking" being one of the most persistent pieces of advice under job-hunt posts.

Three career stages are based on.

Stage 1: What you can learn.

Stage 2: What you know.

Stage 3: Who you know.

What research? Facebook made $18B the year they pushed pivoting and they're a one-stop shop for eyes. Hard to make the business case under traditional principles to keep the status quo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com