
LittleThings online publisher shuts down, blames Facebook's algorithm - johnny313
http://www.businessinsider.com/littlethings-online-publisher-shuts-down-and-blames-facebook-algorithm-2018-2
======
wlesieutre
Here's what LittleThings had to say about being dependent on Facebook in June
2016:

>“I think we need each other. We need them for the traffic; they need us for
the content,” Mr. Speiser said on this week’s WSJ Media Mix podcast. “I think
[Facebook] cares very much. I think without the content all these media
companies are providing there’d be that much less reason to go on to the news
feed.”

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-loves-publishers-
says-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-loves-publishers-says-
littlethings-ceo-1467235057)

Turns out no, I like my newsfeed better without all that content. The content
I want to see on facebook is things that my friends post.

~~~
WingH
“I think we need each other."

This is the epitome of cognitive dissonance. Deluding oneself into thinking
Facebook "needs" them, when in actuality it's Facebook with 1000 times the
power. Did anyone seriously believe this?

~~~
ggg9990
1000? More like 1000 times that!

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sct202
I honestly prefer the Friends and Family content over all the videos and
articles that were filling up my feed previously. I think that it sucks for
all these publishers that relied on Facebook, but I know I for one was getting
fed up with Facebook being filled with stuff my friends liked instead of life
updates.

~~~
petercooper
Whereas on my FB, I've unfollowed almost every individual and my feed is 90%+
"groups". Facebook is absolutely superb for associating with random interest
groups, I've found, now that Usenet is next to useless. Pages, though? Meh.

~~~
WingH
I thought I was the only weirdo that prefers to interact with random strangers
rather than people I know on Facebook. I miss the days of IRC and AIM screen
names. Now we have "real name policies"...

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randomerr
Facebook went through the same kind of issue themselves. At one point Zynga
Games (Farmville fame) was about 70% of Facebook's profits. Then the variety
of phones apps and copycat games Facebook without the ads became popular. This
almost killed Zynga and by proxy Facebook. That was about the time Zuckerberg
also stepped down. Odd timing.

In the business world many people say you should never put more the 30% of
budget at anytime in one market onless yuo have a way to switch out of it.
Since 75% of LittleThings' traffic came from Facebook a YouTube style
adpocolipse scenario was bound to happen eventually.

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ada1981
Headline could also read: "LittleThings builds business model dependent on
some other for profit business, blames them for doing something."

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kpwags
Live by the algorithm...die by the algorithm

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justkez
There's a particularly irksome reference in this article:

> took out roughly 75% of LittleThings' organic traffic while hammering its
> profit margins.

From my admittedly limited expertise this would be called "Social" traffic. In
a time gone by, even "Referral" traffic. I don't imagine that the frequency of
links appearing in private news feeds would lead to any change in organic
traffic.

It may well be an editorial error, but if it's from the horses mouth it's
almost as worrying as the marketing strategy itself.

~~~
AJ007
The better word for organic here is free traffic. Buying newsfeed ads was
either at a loss or break even but the sharing/interactions from the paid
stuff triggered the free traffic.

The founders of LittleThings knew what they were doing. I’m guessing they
pocketed good profits in the beginning and then tried to cash out at the end.
Everyone knew this Facebook newsfeed traffic would end like Zynga.

It has been a big positive for publishers who were getting lower CPMs because
these sites were sucking display network ad spend dry every day. I assume it’s
also a big positive for society since fewer drivers are looking at dumb
Facebook clickbait while flying down the highway.

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KasianFranks
Facebook is on it's way out to being the next AOL, friendster, myspace etc.
They were never anywhere near a Google in terms of revenue, users (youtube,
gmail, search etc) and most importantly, from the ground up algorithmic
utility. Interacting with social connections is different and more transient
than interacting with raw data or information.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Facebook had 2.2 Billion active monthly users at the end of 2017.

That's 1/3 of the people on the planet. Even if you don't trust that number,
its hard to criticize them because they don't have enough _users_.

~~~
ravenstine
How many of those are bots and phony accounts?

In the US & Canada, the number of active accounts has been in decline.

[https://techcrunch-
com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com...](https://techcrunch-
com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/facebook-time-spent/amp/)

Granted, only by ~1 million, but that's not growth.

Facebook will always be profitable in some respect, just as AOL is still
profitable, but it's entirely possible that people are going to get bored and
move on to other things. Old folks will still use Facebook to debate about
which Denny's in town has the better supreme skillet, but there's no sign that
Facebook will hold on to the ubiquity it currently has.

Maybe Facebook will continue to mean something to the world outside the west,
which a graph in the story I linked to seems to suggest.

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thisisit
As noted in the article original source:

[https://digiday.com/media/littlethings-shuts-casualty-
facebo...](https://digiday.com/media/littlethings-shuts-casualty-facebook-
news-feed-change/)

I still find people, even guys, filling my feed with Tasty and look-alike
videos.

~~~
sli
At least a lot of the Tasty videos have some kinda value to them, I suppose.

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jvagner
If their business dried up already, to a fatal degree, they didn't have much
of a business.

If they don't have enough of a core audience to monetize what's left... or
even try, I would wonder what they were really up to.

~~~
Slansitartop
The problem shown by this is that Facebook owns the audience and uses it as it
chooses, and it's getting harder and harder for other sites have have "core
audiences" of their own.

This site may have been one of the weakest ones, but this same issue is
playing out for newspapers and other media organizations, for instance.
Facebook owned the audience, pushed those organizations to tailor their
product to it, then pulled the rug out from under them. That's an enormous
amount of power for one company to have.

~~~
mseebach
I think that's a simplification. Facebook owns _an_ audience, a huge and
(until last month) easily accessible audience. Companies built on renting that
particular audience are going to have a bad time, but that doesn't mean all
audiences have just dried up. Facebook has admitted that the algorithm changes
lowered engagement. Those eyeballs didn't just vanish into thin air, they went
somewhere else, somewhere publishers only focusing on Facebook can't reach
them.

~~~
butterfi
I'm puzzled by the use of the word "own". FB doesn't "own" it's users, which
is kind of the point. Users gonna use, and that might be FB, but also could be
something else. Thinking that FB "owns" their users is similar to LittleThings
thinking they were invaluable. It may not end the way you expect (e.g.
MySpace, AOL, etc).

~~~
Slansitartop
It would be far better if there were a many dozens of Facebooks with roughly
equal numbers of users. It would be a much more intelligible market for the
small fish to operate in, as the whims of any one algorithm wouldn't be so
significant.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of internet traffic is controlled by a
handful of algorithms controlled by an even smaller number of organizations.
Their inscrutable whims can make or break businesses, and that's far to much
power for them to have.

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lunulata
Another content parasite cut loose, what a shame, how will we continue on with
our lives? potential retitle: Big Things Crush LittleThings

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se7entime
anyone still using RSS Feed for their news, article, etc?

i still prefer open my rss reader rather than open any social media sites/app,
except when i want to to see what my friends do than i open my socmed

~~~
dakrootie
Heck,yeah! They’ll have to pry my RSS feed out of my cold, dead hands.

Getting my “content” via RSS is like reading in a cozy, quiet library, whereas
with social it’s like trying to read between a busy construction site and a
highway on-ramp, complete with obnoxious honking and plastered with
billboards.

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tomc1985
If you build your house out of sticks, don't cry when the big bad wolf comes
to blow it down. Sounds like LittleThings could have used a few more BigIdeas

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fludlight
The money quote:

> "Facebook is the destroyer of worlds."

~~~
_rpd
It seems to me that this is the money quote:

> The prioritization of friends/family content over publishers was the last
> straw.

~~~
Daniel_sk
Actually they took to extremes in some countries, there is an ongoing (e.g.
already months) newsfeed experiment in Slovakia and some other countries where
essentially ZERO content from pages is shown, not even the ones I am following
and I would like to actually see the new content. I have to switch the
"Explorer" (Explore) button in the left menu to see content from Pages.

~~~
_rpd
Perhaps publisher traffic will recover once people become used to clicking the
button to see non-friends and family content?

~~~
eli
I've heard more than one publisher say an increase in traffic from Google AMP
is making up for most of the decline in traffic from Facebook

