

The Facebook Serpent and the Content Farmer - coldcode
http://calacanis.com/2015/03/29/the-facebook-serpent-and-the-content-farmer-or-how-google-facebook-can-rebuild-our-trust/

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yourad_io
Note that this is a bit of an exaggeration:

> The same holds true of Google, which the FTC had dead to rights for
> manipulating their search results in favor of their homegrown services and
> AGAINST their own partners. When Google works against its own partners
> covertly, what would a reasonable person call it?

Or at least seems to me that way[1]. "works against its own partners covertly"
it a bit presumptuous as well - certainly implies malice and intent.

To be entirely honest, I'm not sure how this article ties in with reality.
Right now if you are a "content creator" you would actually be the one paying
Facebook in order to simply be able to reach your own fans (Pages). Or, you
simply ignore it and let your users do the Facebook-promoting for you.

While I'm not saying that the current status quo is good, how did we get from
that, to Facebook paying content creators to link to their (freely available)
content?

> These [content creating] companies do not need Facebook, Yahoo, Google, or
> Twitter — in fact, the opposite!

How so? Facebook has "the global audience" \- of certain age groups, at least.
It is the closest thing to an online passport. Content creators get traffic
from Facebook. Facebook gets traffic because of interesting content shared.
They don't "need" Facebook, but it certainly doesn't hurt them that people
have a quick way to share their content with tons of people.

[1] [http://nypost.com/2015/03/30/senate-may-probe-ftc-
decision-t...](http://nypost.com/2015/03/30/senate-may-probe-ftc-decision-to-
give-google-a-pass/)

> The FTC’s competition staff in 2012 recommended suing Google over three
> practices deemed harmful to consumers and rivals, including “scraping”
> content illegally from other sites and restricting advertisers from placing
> ads with rivals.

> Instead of suing, however, the FTC reached an agreement with Google in
> January 2013, in which the search giant voluntarily agreed to change its
> practices to appease regulators.

> It is not unusual for FTC commissioners to vote against taking legal action
> when different divisions of the agency’s staff fail to reach a consensus, a
> DC source said.

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cwyers
> It’s taken a decade, but content companies are now becoming independent,
> strong, and profitable entities. From Netflix, which pays content creators
> in advance for their work, to Buzzfeed, Vice, The Information, Re/code, and
> beyond, we’re seeing a class of independent and strong content-lead
> companies.

Uh... huh.

Netflix's model is about, what, 95% content produced for other distribution
mediums (theatrical/broadcast/cable) that Netflix is paying a relative
pittance for because the marginal cost of distributing them on Netflix after
they've made their money elsewhere is very small and so they don't need to
bring in a lot of money from Netflix in order to be worth the distribution
deal. Buzzfeed is... well, you make about $100 per article writing for
Buzzfeed.[1] The median salary of a journalist in the U.S. is $37,501.[2] As a
conservative estimate, let's double that -- because as a Buzzfeed frelancer
you aren't getting employer medical benefits, you have to pay your own payroll
taxes (anyone who's ever worked freelance/contract knows that the taxes listed
on a typical paycheck are only about half of the taxes that are actually paid,
depending on the breaks), you aren't getting paid vacation and sick days, you
have to provide your own computer, Internet, utilities, etc. So you need to
earn $75,002 as a Buzzfeed writer to match the median salary of a journalist
in real terms. So you need to write 750 articles for Buzzfeed in a year in
order to hit that medium salary, maybe a bit fewer if you can do some longer
articles at a higher rate, but that's still about the same in terms of
wordcount.

And what kind of content are these underpaid Buzzfeed writers actually
cranking out? Go through and actually read the articles under BuzzFeed News on
the front page. Right now, there's an article about Trevor Noah becoming the
host of the Daily Show, which seems to mostly rely upon promotional materials
put out by Noah on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, video of Noah on The
Daily Show and his stand-up show, and a GQ cover he was on. Count up how many
of those things are paid for directly or indirectly by someone else, mostly
Comedy Central. The article on the Germanwings pilot seems cobbled together
from AP, Reuters, New York Times and Sky News articles -- written by people
making that $37,501 salary that our BuzzFeed writers aren't going to get.

The author sees "a class of independent and strong content-lead companies." I
see a bunch of places that are either piggybacking off the products of other,
Old Media entities or getting by on a business model that pays people below-
poverty wages for content -- and sometimes both. I don't think that's
independent or strong or even content-led.

1)
[http://whopays.scratchmag.net/?s=buzzfeed](http://whopays.scratchmag.net/?s=buzzfeed)
2)
[http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journalist/Salary](http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Journalist/Salary)

------
lingben
for those who haven't seen these two relevant veritasium videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g)

------
helyka
Thanks for the post. The story made me laugh.

------
stevenh
I feel Google goes above and beyond to financially compensate content
creators, at least as far as YouTube is concerned. Google even automatically
detects duplicated content in other people's YouTube videos so that true
creators can monetize stolen copies of their own work on the same platform if
they choose.

In contrast, freebooting on Facebook is becoming an enormous problem. Facebook
has a ton of hidden throttles in place which prevent external links such as
YouTube from going viral; they automatically favor stolen reuploaded copies
instead. Those who help Facebook to profit from this theft are rewarded with
more exposure and more likes.

Silent victims are being robbed en masse like this by Facebook on a daily
basis, and many will never realize it.

A recent depressing example I noticed was a video by a woman named Leslie
Hall, whose entire combined view count for all of her copyrighted YouTube
videos over the past nine years was around 12 million. It seems like she's
poured a lot of money and effort into trying to get attention with her strange
videos. Nothing ever really caught on, until finally one of her videos
exploded in popularity, receiving over 16 million views in just one week -
more views than all of her life's work on YouTube had ever received.
Unfortunately, it was a freebooted copy on Facebook which did not even bother
to include her name anywhere. People interested in seeing more of her work
were unable to do so, unless they went the extra mile and performed a google
search for the chorus. That's how I found her, so I emailed her to let her
know she might want to send a DMCA takedown notice or something. She was
extremely upset about the situation.

The same problem applies to other content theft rackets like 9gag, funnyjunk,
imgur, etc. All of these companies have made millions of dollars by stealing
other people's work and hiding behind the false claim that it's "too much
work" to put honest effort into finding and redirecting to the true creator of
anything that goes viral on their own site. Creators of webcomics are perhaps
the biggest victims there. I've contacted comic creators in the past when I
noticed their stolen comic going viral on one of these sites, and many have
said they were silently furious any time it happened.

I believe these sites should be legally required to implement something like
what Google does with YouTube, even if it's just a low-tech solution involving
a single employee who sits there manually performing reverse image searches
all day. As it stands, none of these companies are any more ethical than Kim
Dotcom's Megaupload; the only difference is that the victims are small,
scattered, and don't have hundreds of millions of dollars available to spend
on bending law enforcement to their will to punish these sites that steal from
them.

