
Funny or Die's Matt Klinman: “Facebook has destroyed independent digital comedy” - petethomas
http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy/
======
b1daly
I agree very much with the interviewee that Facebook is a cultural wasteland,
that provides one of the most enervating experiences on the internet.

I think as a young person he doesn’t realize how it was a cultural anomaly
that small time content producers could make money through independent
production of mass media.

Historically, from the development of mass media as an actual business
category, getting your content distributed at all was tightly controlled by
corporate “gate keepers” and was frankly a far more limiting situation for
content creators of all stripes.

I do find it remarkable that Facebook has figured out a way to obtain the vast
majority of the add revenue for the content that streams through their
platform.

There are some unique aspects to the current structure, compared to earlier
media business structures, that come from the incredible scope these
advertising driven platforms have built.

Ultimately, I do think it’s a “tragedy of the commons”situation, or at least a
variation, where the market structure prevents optimal payments flowing to the
creators, who are in fact appreciated by many. The only way around this would
be some form of class organization by creators, a syndicate, Union, coop,
cartel, something.

The problem is that such a structure will be worked around by the many hungry
and talented people out there who will sacrifice far more than you can believe
for the chance to practice their craft.

~~~
workthrowaway27
I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but a lot of these "gate
keepers" are performing useful functions. Particularly for things like books
and movies a major publisher or distributor gives some level of quality
assurance. They also handle a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect an
author or independent filmmaker to be good at.

~~~
msabalau
A good critic or festival programmer provides far more signal about quality
than a publisher or distributor ever does.

Sometimes gatekeepers are providing specialized services that creators might
not be good at or interested in.

In any event, Facebook manages to insert itself as a middle man while
simultaneously lowering quality.

~~~
workthrowaway27
I meant that having a publisher or distributor provides a lower bound for
quality, not that it indicates high quality. There's plenty of crap published
by legitimate publishers and plenty of movies not worth watching. But the
quality is even worse among the people who self-publish (talking about
averages obviously, not outliers).

And for books critics typically only review books from established publishers.
Films might be a bit better in terms of allowing unknown directors to be
discovered because of independent film festivals, but the barrier to entry is
obviously higher.

I agree about Facebook though.

------
mlazos
I always enjoy reading the opinions of people who aren’t in tech. It always
reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs
they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in. At the point
where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by
humans it’s like dude, there’re 2 billion people using this site, that ship
has sailed, we’re at tragedy of the commons-level shit right now. I do agree
with him for the most part though, I just can’t see a solution other than
users not using Facebook anymore or somehow banding together and forcing the
recommendation engine to show us higher quality content by only clicking on
higher quality content which is a sadly far-fetched idea at this point. I can
only hope that people start to limit themselves.

~~~
naravara
Facebook just persists on the inertia of the network effect its leveraging.
The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws
to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It’s bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in
the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically
elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-
markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the
same kind of influence.

~~~
hnal943
> The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws
> to stay in step with the current state of the industry.

It's silly to think that only government intervention could change the status
quo. Who do you know under 40 who likes using Facebook? They are susceptible
to competition from the market, like everyone else. Ask IBM and GE how quickly
ubiquity can evaporate.

~~~
naravara
They’re big enough to buy out any actually threatening competitors. A duopoly
or a small oligopoly aren’t much better.

As for IBM or GE, buddy it took almost an entire generation for their
stranglehold to break down, and in fields with much lower barriers to entry
than this.

------
downandout
He didn’t articulate it well but the issue is the lack of organic reach given
to page posts these days. Facebook has decided that fan page owners should pay
to access their own fans - which negates the entire point of having a page or
fans in the first place.

The issue for Facebook is that as more and more publishers leave because they
are getting no organic traffic, people will spend less time there. So this
whole money grab may eventually backfire on them. If all publishers leave and
only the social functions are left, is Facebook as attractive anymore?

This is of course anecdotal, but many of my friends have not posted on there
in years, and the ones that have average a post or update maybe every few
months. That’s hardly worth sticking around for unless other interesting
things remain in the ecosystem. I’d say that while people are jumping ship,
2018-2019 might be the first time that it is at least within the realm of
possibility that someone could start a viable Facebook competitor. Pigs get
fat, hogs get slaughtered.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
This is one of the reason why e-mail is still relevant in marketing: no
gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your audience.

~~~
WorldMaker
Modulo that the email marketing companies (such as MailChimp) that most
successfully navigate the harsh waters of spam folder avoidance with the major
email providers, enough that you can mostly assume your audience receives the
marketing emails, are themselves approaching something of a monopsony and are
in the process of becoming gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your
audience.

~~~
fwdpropaganda
You absolutely have a point, but the dynamics are different. Multiple such
companies compete to be your e-mail sender. No one is competing with Facebook
to receive money from companies who believed they could reach their audiences
inside Facebook.

~~~
WorldMaker
Sorry, didn't intend to derail here with whataboutism, was thinking about
unrelated problems to the ones at hand in this article. There are too many
hard problems to deal with right now, and we can't fight them all at once,
presumably.

Anyway, you are right, walled gardens are always going to be harder to fix
than the network dynamics of what should be a more open and decentralized
system than is maybe presently the case in practice.

------
notmymain
This whole debate seems to be missing the point. There has never been a world
where independent content creators have been able to monetize what they do on
a massive scale and collect most of the revenue.

At a large scale, the owners of the distribution eat most of the pie. That's
true because of basic comparative advantage and the advantages of scale even
though they are entirely dependent on the individual content creators to get
anything at all from their distribution. If the content creator wants to
collect most/all of the revenue, the pie is small.

~~~
settsu
No, he’s saying the internet upended the old funnel model by providing
democratized global distribution to anyone, but now Facebook has not only
largely reversed progress, they’ve done worse by profiteering on content
they’ve assumed effectively zero cost, risk, or effort in distributing.

Furthermore, they’ve destabilized democratic societies and radicalized
neighbor against neighbor (speaking locally & globally.) Again, all the while,
profiting from their carelessness, suffering few, if any, meaningful
consequences.

~~~
notmymain
Sure, but that's fundamentally untrue. Facebook has gone to considerable
effort and cost and taken great risk to build their network so that they can
then monetize content that gets distributed on their platform.

I'm not a fan of Facebook btw, but just that the argument the guy is making
fails on basic economics.

------
dhruvrrp
The way I see it isn't Facebook that's killing comedy, it's the internet
itself killing ways to monetize online comedy.

The guy considers memes to be the future of internet comedy, well there are
millions of people making them for free. And that just makes it harder for
someone to monetize comedy. Additionally, all this free content being consumed
by peoples is eating in the market share of more serious (professional?) sites
like Funny or Die and the Onion.

~~~
Tech-Noir
He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people
are making jokes for free:

> the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing
> people just giving work away for free

Perhaps people _want_ to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel
good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction.

If anything is killing anything it's _monetization uber alles_.

So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub,
he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can
financially benefit from it.

That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate
Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.

~~~
michaelt

      If anything is killing anything it's
      monetization uber alles.
    

I believe the traditional logic is:

1\. X is good.

2\. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their
lives to it full time.

3\. That means paying and equipping them, which needs revenue.

4\. Therefore things that increase our revenue are good and things that
decrease our revenue are bad.

where X is almost anything in the entertainment industry, and quite a few
things outside it too.

~~~
svantana
Ain't it funny though when people are for of a free market when it works in
their favor, but against it when it doesn't? I.e. when you undercut someone
else's price, that's a market miracle! When someone undercuts you, that's a
race to the bottom, and a clear sign of the end of the golden age...

------
_lex
The problem is that facebook changed their business model (so you have to pay
for people to see your content - he calls it payola), and a lot of content
providers did not change their business models away from expecting free
publicity from facebook. Really, all funny or die needed to do is to switch to
a mailing list-type setup, where they actually can reach their customers
without paying auction prices for every message. They should basically have
given up on facebook as a means of reaching new customers, except for signing
people up to their mailing list-type setup, and then trimmed operations to
work at whatever scale that business could support, with the knowledge that
they could grow that operation on a monthly basis to eclipse their facebook
viewership.

More content providers need to recognize that facebook sees their relationship
as being zero sum, and that facebook controls all the cards in their own game,
so it doesnt matter how many impressions/views you can get from facebook -
they are the ones who benefit. You get to pay content generation costs.

~~~
notyourday
I think it is a lot more fundamental than this. Facebook spent _years_
building the unsexy stuff : a delivery platform that reaches eyeballs. Not
only it works but it dwarfs all other delivery platforms.

It was being _laughed_ at by all serious content creators who thought they had
avenue, the content and the brand loyalty. Now we clearly know that there's
only one Facebook and there are tons of content creators and those content
creators are 100% interchangeable according to the general public as the
layoffs in content creator space indicate.

------
bambax
> _The other solution, which seems crazy, is for there to be a meta organizing
> campaign, where media companies band together and refuse to post on
> Facebook, essentially going on strike and withholding their labor until they
> are compensated._

But why are media companies still posting on FB today, if they don't get
compensated for it?? What's the point? Eyeballs with no revenue??

Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the
videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> Eyeballs with no revenue?

Presumably so. Recognition/fame/having a loyal following are going to be of
great value to modern stand-up comedians. I imagine Facebook's non-monetized
videos are more of an issue for someone using online videos as their primary
source of revenue (i.e. YouTube personalities).

My understanding is that the music industry has been that way ever since music
recordings could be published - top musicians make most of their money from
performances, and only a small amount from royalties, but without the
recordings they'd never have the large performances.

~~~
jonbarker
Actually the Grateful Dead pioneered this approach. People thought they were
crazy giving recordings away.

~~~
deadbunny
Which works if you have a secondary method of making money (live shows, merch)
which I doubt a lot of people making short comedy videos do.

------
Tech-Noir
Unlike others here, I don't sympathise with this at all, so this may be
unpopular with some people.

The complaint however seems to be: "we wanted Facebook to serve our interests,
but Facebook wanted to serve their own interests for some inexplicable reason,
so they suck".

I loathe Facebook and think the internet and the world would be a better place
without it. I also - for that reason - _don 't fucking use it_ (support it)
and certainly don't work on content and then put it on Facebook, because it's
bleedin' obvious you don't get to 1.5 billion users by supporting other sites.

To cap it all, after all his whining, he's _still_ a Facebook user to this
day, simply kidding himself that he's sticking it to the man by impotently
criticising it. As if anyone at Facebook cares what you do, so long as you do
it on Facebook.

Facebook is - still - not the internet. If you don't like Facebook, don't use
it, and definitely don't put your hard work there.

Meanwhile, if people stop visiting your site, maybe look closer to home
instead of trying to lay the blame elsewhere.

He's basically a million other dinosaurs who had early success with something
and is now reduced to self-pity about the 'good old days' because his 15
minutes are up, and people have moved on to something else.

Funny or die? Adapt or die.

~~~
birksherty
Your are twisting what the person said and then presented it in different way
to make it look awful. His main point was that, facebook is getting all the
profit instead of content creators. And they are getting sacked. Your comments
are derogatory in this topic.

~~~
ndh2
But who's forcing the Funny or Die guy to put content on Facebook?

~~~
Joeboy
Nobody, but if they didn't then somebody else would put their content on
Facebook and claim the income.

~~~
jasode
How does somebody like NetFlix deal with it? (E.g. a half hour show
Standups.[1])

Does a pirate post the Netflix clip and therefore Facebook+pirate make money
off of it? Or does Netflix issue a DMCA takedown so fast that it's a non
issue?

(I realize that FunnyOrDie is voluntarily placing their show on the Facebook
platform (and also _paying_ Facebook to place their content there) ... but
let's hypothesize what options FunnyOrDie has to keep their content off of
Facebook.)

[1]
[https://www.netflix.com/title/80175685](https://www.netflix.com/title/80175685)

~~~
Joeboy
I guess either Netflix's legal department gets on it or, more likely, the
reuploader makes money off it.

According to [1], "Of the videos on Facebook, 72.5% are pirated. “According to
a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1,000 most popular
Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen reuploads,” says Hank Green. “Just
these 725 ‘freebooted’ videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views
last quarter.”

Admittedly that's 2015, entirely unfactchecked by me and (I've just learned)
Facebook now has some new rights management tools, not sure how the land lies
right now.

[1] [https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-freebooting-
wha...](https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-freebooting-what-
marketers-need-to-know/)

~~~
deadbunny
They are doing exactly what YouTube did to begin with, "suffer" high levels of
piracy to get people using the platform, slowly bring in tools to combat the
piracy.

------
ohiovr
How about a federated subscription? Form some kind of single login
subscription model that supports several websites that are not necessarily
corporately affiliated. The more sites in your federation the more clout it
has. It could follow the fremium model to not turn everyone away yet allow the
majority of good content to have a monitary return. I see this as an another
potential answer to declining newspaper quality. The interent hasn't broken
the law that says you get what you pay for.

~~~
my_ghola
I think you just described flattr or patreon.

~~~
ohiovr
Thanks for that. I wonder why it isn't interesting for major newspapers.

------
Quarrelsome
I feel like the whole LEAN mindset is also pushing this. Everyone is metrics,
everyone is stats, you chase the numbers and fail to realise you might be
making all your users miserable yet trapped.

------
Feniks
"I was just angry and frustrated and sad that you can’t make cool shit for the
internet anymore and make a living".

The internet existed before people made money from it. Plenty of cool shit
back then.

------
debt
I think saying it destroyed independent digital comedy is extremely incorrect.

Memes have taken off and are now the primary form of digital comedy. They’re
cheap to create and distribute(both photo and video forms). Memes are alive
and well and very much a form indepdent digital comedy. Memes are wildly
popular.

Sometimes, most of the time?, memes are funnier than longer form digital
content.

I think Funny or Die didn’t evolve quick enough so wants to place the blame on
Facebook and while I think some of what he says is undeniable true, how do you
explain memes?

------
xbmcuser
I quit facebook years ago for this reason. Many people quit facebook for
privacy reasons my main reason to quit was that facebook was consuming the
open web. Where many businesses etc were using facebook as their main web
presence. It allowed them to have low cost web presence but to me this was
going to lead to death of the open web.

------
zerostar07
i wonder if someone has researched the eternal september problem in depth to
prove if there is or there isn't a solution.

~~~
pharke
The solution for colleges was to only allow a limited number of admissions at
one point in the year. Perhaps that could work again, have some number of
spots to be filled that is a fraction of the current population and prioritize
applicants based on their ability to perform some action such as writing a
coherent essay or proving some stake in the community.

------
awalton
s/Comedy/Online short-format video content/g.

Facebook desperately needs to fix this situation - they've grossly mishandled
their video solution in order to try to beat YouTube, and it's costing content
creators billions. I can't imagine it will be too much longer before these
people figure out a legal class and file a blockbuster lawsuit over it.

------
kaolti
Time for Steemit and D.tube

------
thisisit
> they are favoring things that are clickbait, things that are optimized for
> Facebook, low-quality things that appeal to the lowest common denominator
> and, honestly, just things at random

Isn't that the Internet nowadays? I mean the article headline is a good
example. The correct version might have been more explanatory about the
content like "interview with" or "Funny or Die lays off" or even about "online
comedy" but they still went for a more click baity headline about Facebook
killing all the comedy in the world.

------
MaxBarraclough
TL;DR: Comedy isn't dying - that's just clickbait bullshit - but Facebook is
making it difficult for independent comedy websites to survive, and content-
producers can't monetize.

The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet.

Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's
interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. Maybe things will improve.
(Ideally of course, things wouldn't 'improve' in the direction of silos like
Facebook.)

~~~
lmm
> Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's
> interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy.

It is in Facebook's interest. I'm sure Facebook would be willing to spend
money to make Facebook offer a better comedy experience for their users. But
why would they pay comedy producers when plenty of equally high-quality comedy
is submitted there without them paying anything? As for offering a consistent
interface, that's a feature rather than a bug, and as a Facebook user it's one
I appreciate.

------
blowski
Another way I think Facebook is killing comedy is the outrage every time a
comedian makes an edgy joke. I recognise this isn't solely caused by or
limited to Facebook, but social networking is definitely a contributing
factor.

~~~
croon
I don't know if you're referencing anything specific, but comedians being edgy
has never been an issue. Comedians being edgy to cover for their lack of humor
is.

I've never been offended by a topic, but I have cringed at a lot of extremely
bad jokes.

~~~
xaqfox
Top comedians seem to disagree with your absolute assertion.

[https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-
colleg...](https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleges-
feat/index.html)

Also, I seemed to have missed that vote that granted you the role of humor
police, judging all that is and is not funny.

~~~
croon
The point of an algorithm is it can work regardless of what values you put
into it (my opinion or someone elses).

It's entirely possible that I don't have a good/common/high brow/low
brow/whatever sense of humor (though I obviously think I have a great one),
but the entire point I was making was:

Am I as a comedian approaching this subject in the service of my joke/keen
insight, or am I doing it for shock value/to be "edgy"?

I guess the audience can never truly know, but that doesn't change the fact
that it is often varying degrees of obvious.

~~~
blowski
That sounds like how a developer would approach comedy.

------
dingo_bat
> It’s the Jurassic Park lesson: Just because you can do something doesn’t
> mean you should.

I sympathize with the main point in the article. But this statement is stupid
in the extreme. You should do everything you can.

~~~
adrianN
I'm pretty sure you can jump off a high building, but I would not recommend
that you actually do it.

