THE PUBLISHER’S SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE POST-FACEBOOK ERA

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THE END IS NIGH. FACEBOOK IS MAKING MAJOR CHANGES TO ITS NEWS FEED THAT WILL, AMONG OTHER THINGS:

• Deprioritize publisher content

• Potentially expose publishers to fraud

• Promote friends and family content

• Benefit for influencer marketing

• Cause ad rates for brands to go up

• Remake Facebook

The fallout of this latest change will continue to be

felt for months to come. In this special Digiday guide,

Digiday editors and reporters walk you through what

to expect in the post-Facebook era.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Facebook’s Terrible Year

‘We’re Losing Hope’: Facebook Tells Publishers Big Change Is Coming To News Feed

‘Organic Reach On Facebook Is Dead’: Advertisers Expect Price Hikes After Facebook’s Feed Purge

‘A Watershed Moment’: Publishers Find Hope In A More Rational Post-Facebook Media Landscape

Advertisers See Merits Of The Facebook Algorithm Change

‘Awesome dynamic’: Influencer marketing gets a boost with Facebook changes

How Facebook’s Feed Purge Could Expose Publishers To Fraud

News-Feed Change Raises Questions For The Future Of Facebook Watch

‘He’s not a PR guy’: Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, has become an unlikely good guy to publishers

Digiday+ Research

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FACEBOOK’S TERRIBLE YEARBY MAX WILLENS

Facebook had a terrible, horrible, no-good very bad year in the court of public opinion.

Agencies and brands thwacked it for screwing up its video analytics, a problem it had been wrestling with since 2016. Publishers grum-bled about declining referral traffic and paltry payouts on the news feed videos they’d hired so many people to make.

But Facebook is used to slings and arrows from the rest of the media and marketing world. In 2017, members of the mainstream media, and even some lawmakers, came at Facebook with a much more serious charge: That the filter bubbles it inflated were threat-ening the world’s democracies. Suddenly, the cloud of ambient goodwill that the social net-work had floated on throughout its existence seemed very thin.

Instead of being the thing that connected the world, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long en-visioned, Facebook suddenly seemed closer to the digital equivalent of fast food or smok-ing: Unhealthy, unsafe, and frankly, kind of uncool. It’s hard to make the case that it was a true annus horribilis. Facebook posted record earnings of $10.3 billion the third quarter of 2017, the most recent period reported to the SEC. But in the 12 months that preceded Facebook announcing it would reduce the amount of publisher content it surfaced in its newsfeed, the platform took heat like it’s never taken before. Here’s a quick recap.

Nov. 10, 2016: On stage at the Techonomy conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg dismisses the notion that fake news spread on

Facebook influenced the 2016 presidential election as a “pretty crazy idea.”

“Our job, our goal is to help people see the content that’s going to be the most meaning-ful and interesting to them,” Zuckerberg said.

Jan. 11, 2017: Facebook announces the launch of the Facebook Journalism Project, a project designed to offer tools and training to journalists, spearhead the development of news products and promote news literacy, among other things.

“We want to do our part to enable people to have meaningful conversations, to be informed and to be connected to each other,” Facebook director of product, Fidji Simo, writes in an introductory blog post.

April 6, 2017: Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vp of news feed, announces in a blog post that Facebook is making an attempt to limit the spread of fake news on its platform. The original post, which will eventually be updat-ed five more times over the next five months, describes Facebook’s efforts to partner with third-party fact-checkers, shut down spammy accounts and promote media literacy through the News Integrity Initiative.

“We need to work across industries to help solve this problem,” Mosseri writes.

April 7, 2017: Kurt Gessler, a deputy digital editor at the Chicago Tribune, notes that the organic reach of his publication’s posts has fallen dramatically, reaching a low it hadn’t seen all year.

The decline, which mirrors those observed at several other publications, confounds Gessler and compels him to wonder, in writing, whether it might be time to reassess Face-book’s role in his distribution strategy. “If 1 of 3 Facebook posts isn’t going to be surfaced by the algorithm to a significant degree, that would change how we play the game,” Gessler wrote on Medium.

May 17, 2017: Facebook announces, for the second time in 10 months, that it has changed its algorithm as part of an attempt to limit the spread of clickbait in its news feed. The changes, which include assessing what do-main the content comes from and whether the headline deliberately withholds information, are greeted with cautious optimism by media and marketing observers.

“This will be Facebook’s eternal fight,” Nate Elliott, a marketing tech adviser, tells Digiday the next day. “Facebook will fight clickbait every day for the rest of its existence.”

Sept. 6, 2017: Facebook acknowledges that “approximately $100,000” worth of advertis-ing was used to boost content connected to 470 different accounts. That content, accord-ing to Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos, was designed to sow divisiveness and tensions around topics including LGBT rights, race issues and gun rights.

Early estimates from social media analysts estimate that as many as 70 million Americans were exposed to the ads.

September 18, 2017: Reports surface

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that Facebook is actively suppressing posts published on its platform by Rohingya, an ethnic minority who were victims of what U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would later describe as an attempted ethnic cleansing by the Mayan Marese military.

Sept. 21, 2017: Facebook announces it will turn 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by Rus-sians during the 2016 U.S. presidential elec-tion over to Congress to aid in an investigation into the role Russian interference played in the election’s outcome.

“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” Zuckerberg says on Facebook Live.

Sept. 27, 2017: Writing on Facebook, Zuck-erberg expresses regret for the comments made the previous November, hours after President Donald Trump tweets that Facebook is “anti-Trump.”

“Calling that ‘crazy’ was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg writes.

Oct. 24, 2017: Facebook announces the launch of News Feed Publisher Guidelines, a primer on how Facebook determines what content to share with its users, as well as a se-ries of do’s and don’ts on the kinds of content it expects publishers to distribute.

Oct. 31, 2017: Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, testifies before Congress that as many as 126 million Americans may have been exposed to Russian-distributed misinfor-mation through its platform.

Nov. 22, 2017: The day before Thanksgiv-ing, Facebook announces that it will create a portal that users can use determine whether they clicked on any stories circulated by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian hacking team charged with spreading misinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The page goes live two days after Christmas, with no announcement.

Dec. 18, 2017: Facebook announces it is cracking down on engagement bait. “We will demote posts that go against one of our key News Feed values – authenticity,” a blog post reads.

Jan. 4, 2018: An audience development executive tells Digiday that Facebook will “completely reprioritize” publishers in 2018.

Jan. 11, 2018: Digiday breaks the story that Facebook will drastically reduce the amount of publisher content it shows in its news feed.

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‘WE’RE LOSING HOPE’: FACEBOOK TELLS PUBLISHERS BIG CHANGE IS COMING TO NEWS FEEDBY LUCIA MOSES

The end is nigh. Facebook is planning a major change to its news feed, that will decisively favor user content and effectively deprioritize publishers’ content, according to three pub-lishers that have been briefed by the platform ahead of the move.

Those who have been briefed say that under the new test, Facebook told them it will favor content that’s shared by users or otherwise actively engaged with. The thinking goes, according to those briefed, that Facebook be-lieves prioritizing content that’s acted on will reduce the occurrence of fake and offensive content in the news feed.

Publishers still have many questions about the impending news feed change. Facebook told them that content from reputable publishers will also be surfaced. It didn’t specify how it would define “reputable publisher” or how their traffic would be impacted, though. The worry for publishers is that such an approach will have the unintended consequence of hurting high-quality content because a lot of legitimate news articles, while they may get read, tend not to get shared or commented on.

A Facebook rep wouldn’t confirm (or deny) these changes on the record but later ad-dressed the plans in a blog post and to The New York Times. Facebook’s head of news partnerships Campbell Brown informed pub-lishers of the changes in an email, in which she acknowledged that the changes will “take some time to figure out.”

Facebook has been taking steps in this direc-tion for some time, making tweaks to amplify users’ content while weeding out spam and clickbait. Publishers who have been briefed by Facebook believe this latest move would cause a more dramatic decline in publishers’ ability to reach audiences in the news feed, though. Although Facebook isn’t the referral source it once was for publishers, it remains a major source of referral traffic for them, only recently surpassed by Google.

“They’re breaking the bad news one by one,” said one person who was briefed by Face-book on the changes, adding that along with the user content change, Facebook also was prioritizing its scripted Watch shows, its major video initiative, as it tries to grab TV ad dollars. “My impression is they’re going to move away from what we think of as Facebook videos.”

As Facebook sends them less traffic, pub-lishers have been diversifying away from Facebook and fishing for traffic on other platforms such as Google, Apple News and Twitter. Another downgrade in the news feed is likely to accelerate publishers’ shift in resources away from Facebook. Even some of Facebook’s strongest publisher boosters express mounting frustration. “We’re losing hope,” said one.

Last year, Facebook tested a newsless news feed called the Explore Feed in six countries outside the U.S., causing publishers to freak out and spurring speculation that Facebook would replicate that approach in the U.S.,

despite Facebook saying it didn’t expect to roll out the test further. Founder Mark Zuck-erberg has publicly acknowledged problems wrought by technology, including misuse and abuse of the platform, which has amplified the spread of hate-filled content and misin-formation and has been used to attempt to influence voters in the presidential election. Facebook has made a number of moves to stamp out fake news, but their results have been mixed.

Another big downgrade in the news feed won’t necessarily come as a shock to publish-ers, but it conflicts sharply with Facebook’s public stance about how it’s trying to help publishers. That was the stated aim of the year-old Facebook Journalism Project, which Facebook launched to much fanfare about helping support publishers’ business models.

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‘ORGANIC REACH ON FACE-BOOK IS DEAD’ ADVERTISERS EXPECT PRICE HIKES AFTER FACEBOOK’S FEED PURGEBY SEB JOSEPH

If any brands haven’t already shifted their Facebook strategy entirely to paid, then they may have to soon.

The social network is changing its news feed to prioritize what friends and family share, which will reduce the amount of content that users see from brands and publishers.

Agencies believe brands will have to spend more on paid ads on Facebook in order to get the same number of views — further lining Facebook’s pockets. This is just the “final nail in the existing coffin” of organic reach, said Doug Baker, director of strategic services at digital agency AnalogFolk.

Facebook’s ad rates have risen by 35 percent in the last quarter alone. Agencies have noticed a slow decline in organic reach on Facebook for some time. Digital agency Jellyfish said organic reach on Facebook is already around 2 percent across most Euro-pean clients. John Hegeman, Facebook’s vp of product management, said in a statement on the news feed update that advertising on the social network will be “unaffected,” but agencies disagree.

Far too many brands pump bland broadcast comms into mass-reach media buys on Face-book and spam millions of news feeds, said Mobbie Nazir, chief strategy officer at agency We Are Social. Now, there will be far more onus on planning Facebook campaigns that go deeper into media planning, campaign execution and optimization, and reporting on various metrics, she added.

“We all need to become better media planners, said Greg Allum, head of social at Jellyfish. There’s a “fundamental shift” in the

roles of traditional social media marketers encapsulated in the news feed update, he added. Not only “do you have to understand brand and content,” marketers also require a key understanding of how to plan media campaigns on social.

For many brands, the bigger challenge will emerge from Facebook’s parallel war on low-quality brand content, with the platform’s December announcement that it was depri-oritizing “engagement bait.” While agencies accept it will be difficult for most brands to be consistently “meaningful” — particularly when competing with treasured moments with friends and family — there is an opportunity to drive higher creative standards. “Those brands that look to add value to people’s lives and invest in high-quality, original content will have the most sustained success,” Baker said.

The risk could come once brands find loopholes in the algorithm. “I can see brands that tap into authentic conversations with a credible point of view will do well,” said Chris Pearce, the CEO at digital agency TMW Unlimited, “whereas others will be tempted to be increasingly controversial or polarizing in order to stimulate conversation.”

Another risk is if posts are boosted. Ad rankings on Facebook are not affected by the news feed’s overhaul. But as Kevin Chan, the integrated performance director at iProspect, pointed out, if a boosted page post is getting less organic reach due to these changes, then that might impact the auction. Engagement is a “very small” part of ad ranking on the social network, which relies on many other data points to determine what ads people see to ensure relevancy and value, he said.

It seems like Facebook is returning to being a social network rather than a news organiza-tion. In the enduring debate on Facebook’s impact on post-truth politics, the social network has continually denied it is a media company. This algorithm change looks like a step to confirm that, returning to the days of wall posts and status updates.

In terms of how this change will be pitched to brands, Edie Greaves, senior strategist at digital agency Possible, believes there will be a continuation of the stance from both Facebook and Snapchat that brands are “part-ners,” not “advertisers.”

Greaves believes Facebook will begin offering brands new ways to communicate with people, but they will have to up their spend to get into the news feed. Perhaps Facebook will follow in the footsteps of networks like WeChat that heavily restrict the role brands play in the news feed but give more free reign to advertisers within messaging apps, she added.

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‘A WATERSHED MOMENT’: PUBLISHERS FIND HOPE IN A MORE RATIONAL POST-FACEBOOK MEDIA LANDSCAPEBY LUCIA MOSES

The warnings have been years in coming. Ever since Facebook surpassed Google as the top traffic referral source in 2015, publishers have seen Facebook send less and less traffic to their sites as it’s made tweak after tweak to its formula to favor users’ posts on over publish-ers’ and brands’ posts.

Facebook dropped a bomb recently that it would change the news feed to favor posts from friends and acknowledged that publish-ers would take a hit. Facebook is in the midst of an existential crisis, with the platform under fire for offensive content polluting the feed and enabling the spread of fake news and Russian meddling in the election. With Mark Zuckerberg talking about none less than his legacy being at stake, everything signaled this was more than just another algorithm change but a fundamental shift away from promoting news posts, which was never core to Facebook’s mission of connecting every man, woman and child in the world in the first place. This decision, which sent tremors through media companies, was not your average algorithmic tweak.

“It’s all fallout from the election,” one publish-er said, speaking anonymously to avoid irking Facebook. “They’re tired of dealing with it and it’s not worth the effort internally.”

It also might mark the beginning of the end of the Facebook media era, where a social network became a chokehold on an indus-try, crowning new publishing upstarts who mastered feeding the Facebook beast and left many publishers wondering what shoe would drop next as Facebook kept changing its priorities from clicky stories to short videos to live videos to long-form programming.

Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media, has warned publishers of platform dependency for the past two years. The move, in his view, is fundamentally an “admission of vulnerabil-ity” by Facebook. While many will feel short-term pain, the lasting impact of Facebook occupying a shrunken role in media is for a healthier industry that rewards loyalty, strong brands and sound business models.

“This move can be interpreted as one of the first cracks in the facade of the duopoly,” he said. “This development is very good for all of media in the long run.”

In the short term, of course, there is pain. But that pain will not be evenly distributed.

“This one’s really going to capture the atten-tion of publishers in the sense of, you can’t build a business around the Facebook algo-rithm because you don’t know when it’s going to change,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, a trade group representing newspapers from local outlets all the way up to Dow Jones and The New York Times.

For publishers that have become too reliant on a business model that relied on amassing big audiences with viral but undifferentiated content, this newest news feed change is a reckoning. A lot of publishers have audience scale but little else to differentiate them-selves. What’s more, these publishers weren’t making much money off that scale — it was, in many cases, empty calories.

“Traffic chasers’ fall from grace will be severely expedited,” said Rich Antoniello, CEO of Complex Networks. “If they were going to be

out of business in three years, now it will be 12 months.” Said another publisher CEO: “Any-one who listened to Facebook and optimized to reach in the feed is in tough shape.”

Forward-thinking publishers have been moving toward focusing on content that engenders loyalty and hopefully subscription revenue. They’re also pushing to diversify their traffic sources so they’re less dependent on Facebook, still the second biggest referrer of traffic just after Google. There are still many unanswered questions about what the chang-es will mean for different types of publishers and content, but it’s safe to say this diversifi-cation shift will accelerate as publishers move from shock and dismay to asking what tactical things they can do to insulate themselves from an increasingly newsless news feed.

Many have adopted Facebook Groups as a way to deepen their connections with readers in smaller numbers but with stronger engage-ment, for example.

“It’s time for us as an industry to look more closely at the other ways to grow audiences,” said Matt Karolian, who heads social media for Boston Globe Media. “Does it make sense to maintain all the pages you have now? I don’t think you should be spending a lot of time on improving your Facebook page 10 percent when I don’t think that’s going to be a growth effort.”

Boston Globe Media has been preparing itself for this day, shifting its focus from Facebook pages to other parts of Facebook including groups, that don’t have as large an overall au-dience but have significantly higher engage-ment, Karolian said.

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Even hard news, which many predict will take a hit in the new news feed because users don’t typically comment or share it, can still find airtime on Facebook if it’s framed in terms of how it impacts people’s lives, which can then prompt people to share or comment on it, he argues.

“Publishers will take all the energies and re-source into a low-return strategy and put those into different areas,” especially those driving direct relationships, said Smith.

In the coming weeks, audience development pros will be closely monitoring their traffic data to see if and how Facebook’s news feed change impacts them before reacting. Some will doubtless continue the Facebook tap dance to see if they can alter their strategy to give Facebook what it wants. Jason Stein, CEO of Cycle, predicts “a drawn-out period of experimentation.”

Still, there’s a growing sense that publishers are wanting out. It’s hard to find a publisher that’s happy with the money they’re making from all the content they put on Facebook’s platform. In a sense, this is just the latest in a string of half-steps and unkept promises by Facebook, whether it’s the ever-changing video strategy to fast-loading Instant Articles that haven’t provided enough monetization. For many publishers, the good will has run out. They’ll still post to Facebook, but have given up waiting for Facebook to become a significant revenue driver.

“If it’s a piece of the marketing puzzle, you model that very differently,” said Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade group Digital Content Next. “You look at the costs and make sure you can justify it as a marketing expense.”

Facebook is a regulator of the news business without accountability, Chavern said. “It is

a watershed moment in terms of publishers being much more cynical about their ability to build a business on Facebook.”

And for Facebook, the test will be whether replacing news with more baby photos and status updates will help its business, which is predicated on obsessive user engagement.

“The loser here is Facebook,” Bloomberg’s Smith said. “I can’t imagine that taking off all this quality news content and replacing it with personal connections experiences will result in deeper engagement.”

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ADVERTISERS SEE MERITS OF THE FACEBOOK ALGORITHM CHANGEBY YUYU CHEN

While publishers are panicked by the loss of Face-book’s referral traffic, media buyers think brands will be relatively unscathed by the algorithm change.

For starters, brands have treated Facebook like a pay-to-play platform for a long time, and Facebook said the new algorithm won’t affect paid posts on the platform, although CPM rates for Facebook ads may eventually increase, according to agency executives. However, they think the new Facebook algorithm will filter out clickbait-style promotions (“Like our product if you think this dog is cute”), which will pressure brands to create more meaning-ful content over the long term.

Brands already know that they get little visibility from unpaid content on Facebook, said Brittany Richter, head of social media for iProspect. Most brand con-tent on Facebook is in the form of posts that don’t necessarily show up on a company page and are distributed through ad filters, and ad ranking won’t change under the new algorithm.

Organic content doesn’t work as well as paid posts on Facebook, but Mike Dossett, vp of digital strategy for RPA, thinks many brands still use it to communicate with their fans. “Losses here could im-pact if and how brands continue to invest in organic, non-boosted content within their overall content strategy,” he said.

Steve Buors, CEO and co-founder for digital market-ing agency Reshift Media, believes Facebook’s new algorithm will push brands to think less about what the company’s point of view and focus more on what their audience cares about, which will create opportunities for advertisers.

“Facebook is forcing people to create quality and relevant content,” said Buors. “Social was a means to one-on-one communications, but over time, people were becoming lazy. Those changes won’t impact brands that purchase quality content, but will hit those who chase viral, meme-like posts.”

Buors thinks brands can also surprise and delight offline — a pizzeria can give each consumer a free soda, for instance — to encourage people to share their experience online. Or in a Facebook post, a brand can ask questions like, “What feature do you think we need to add to our product?” to generate interaction and debate, he said.

It’s unclear if Facebook’s new algorithm will deprior-itize Facebook Live. If it doesn’t, brands could use it to get into the news feed, Buors and Richter said. (Facebook was not available to comment at press time.)

Agency executives say it’s too early to determine the effect Facebook’s algorithm change will have on paid media. But James Douglas, svp and executive director of social media for Society, said CPM and cost-per-click rates for Facebook ads will likely in-crease because inventory on the platform will prob-ably decline if publishers take a hit. Facebook CPMs vary based on ad formats and targeting parameters, but they can range from $1 to $15, according to Douglas.

“We will keep an eye on Instagram if we need to move clients’ [Facebook] ad budget around,” said Douglas. “We will also look at other alternatives like Snapchat.”

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‘AWESOME DYNAMIC’: INFLUENCER MARKETING GETS A BOOST WITH FACEBOOK CHANGESBY SHAREEN PATHAK

The Facebook algorithm change that has publishers panicking may be good news for a certain group inside the industry: influencers and their followers.

As Facebook decides to favor content from friends and family over posts from (certain) publishers, agency buyers are telling clients to focus more on influencer content.

“By prioritizing [user-generated content], Facebook is giving brands an opportunity to double down on influencers that maintain authentic relationships with their audiences,” said Corey Martin, who heads influencer marketing at 360i.

Martin said he takes Facebook’s explanation of the news-feed change at face value — that it wants to clean up a cluttered news feed and potentially cut down on fake news. Facebook is telling agencies they won’t see any major changes for paid promotion, although ad rates might increase.

But influencer marketing seems poised to benefit the most from the change: When done on its own, influencer content essentially mimics content from friends and family.

“I would tell clients to do more influencer content,” said Martin. “Facebook has more control over influencers and they have less control over media partners. I don’t think it’ll negatively impact buying ads within the Facebook environment.”

Marco Hansell, CEO at Speakr, said his com-pany found that influencer content performs between five and 10 times better in terms of engagement when an influencer rather than a brand posts it. And if Facebook is already removing brands from the feed, it increases engagement among accounts with organic engagement.

“It’s now this awesome dynamic where brands show up less in the feed,” said Hansell, “and what’s showing up is content coming from public-figure pages, friends and family.”

The “handshakes” — how Facebook shows customers that content was created by influencers for brands — in this case wouldn’t punish the brands. Instead, brands might get some overflow likes from people clicking through to the brand page, too.

Boosting influencer content could be great for Facebook, which has long asked brands and agencies to create a paid strategy for influenc-er content. By doing that, it can get more ad dollars while getting credit for “cleaning up the feed.”

Noah Mallin, managing partner and head of experience, content and sponsorship at Wavemaker, said he expects Facebook to explore ways to make influencers a bigger part of the platform. While Facebook has plenty of influencer activity, it’s not as popular with influencers as Instagram or YouTube. But Mallin said that the same brand-safety issues that have impacted news also exist around influencers. “What are the safeguards around that?”

Organically speaking, influencers rank better than brands in the news feed, and depriori-tizing news can be favorable for influencers. And the new algorithm is expected to mostly punish clickbait-style language, which means brands will need to make meaningful and “authentic” content, which creates room for more influencer partnerships.

In a note sent to its clients this week, agency RPA said as much: “With this new directive at the platform level of making Facebook a place for facilitating and rewarding meaning-ful social connections, brands who haven’t

already made that a fundamental filter for their creative will absolutely need to do so — not only to appease the algorithms, but to ensure that they have a natural, authentic role in what could be the newly characterized Facebook experience.”

Justin Moore, founder at Trending Family, sees one potential glitch, though. Facebook last year pushed many influencers on both Face-book and Instagram to convert to “business” pages. (Most were previously categorized as “public figures.”) There wasn’t any access to full analytics on Instagram without being a business profile, and for larger influencers, brand campaigns required whitelisting and paid media access to an influencer handle. And under the new algorithm, business pages would be punished.

“At at first blush, it does not seem like good news,” said blogger Grace Atwood, who has a business profile.

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HOW FACEBOOK’S FEED PURGE COULD EXPOSE PUBLISHERS TO FRAUDBY ROSS BENES

One unintended consequence of Facebook’s feed purge is that it may make publishers more vulnerable to ad fraud.

With Facebook favoring user content and depriori-tizing publishers’ posts in its news feed, publishers will turn to traffic resellers to make up for the clicks they’re losing from Facebook, said independent ad fraud consultant Augustine Fou. The traffic brokers found through online forums and LinkedIn tend to specialize in low-cost traffic that’s of low quality, though. More than 90 percent of the sites that DoubleVerify flags for having high levels of fraud purchase clicks from traffic resellers.

An exec at a digital lifestyle publisher, speaking on the condition of anonymity, anticipated buying more traffic to make up what his site loses from organic visits. This publisher has people devoted to making money on paid Facebook traffic through arbitrage and has gotten the cost down to a few cents a click.

Publishers that don’t already focus on buying Facebook traffic won’t be able to afford those prices at scale, so they’ll likely turn to traffic sellers whose costs per click are under a cent.

Publishers that pay celebrities like George Takei and Lil Wayne to promote their content on Facebook are also likely to find themselves in a precarious situation. Facebook has told publishers that people will see less content from celebrities in their news feed. Facebook did not reply to an interview request for this story.

“Publishers that rely on celebrities will scramble and turn to lower-tier traffic markets,” the publisher exec said. “Those that don’t know how to do proper audience targeting [with paid Facebook traffic] will get crushed.”

Jonathan Mendez, board member of ad tech firm Yieldbot, said that when Facebook and Google change their algorithms to reduce organic traffic, a swath of publishers reacts by purchasing cheap clicks from traffic brokers. Getting industrywide data on this effect is difficult because publishers typically don’t publicly admit to buying traffic, even though the practice is common, and getting data from the traffic brokers requires sleuthing.

Facebook at least has real human users, which can’t be said of many traffic sellers. If publishers turn to traffic sellers as a shortcut to replace their declining referrals from Facebook, then they’ll likely end up with a high amount of fraud that drives down their CPMs, Mendez said.

Of course, publishers aren’t blameless in this scenar-io. Nobody forced publishers to become depen-dent on Facebook, just as nobody is going to force publishers to buy cheap clicks when Facebook rips the rug out from underneath them. But platform-de-pendent publishers that are already feeling strained are likely to look for a new source of cheap clicks, according to an ad fraud exec, speaking anony-mously.

“If the publishers are running light on traffic, they will take steps to buy the traffic, and so they are contrib-uting to fraud,” the ad fraud source said. “In their desperation, they may make the entire ecosystem worse.”

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NEWS-FEED CHANGE RAISES QUESTIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF FACEBOOK WATCHBY SAHIL PATEL

With algorithmic changes underway for Facebook’s news feed, which will devalue most media content in favor of posts shared by users, the future of Facebook Watch will be tied to how well Facebook and video makers can get people to click over to the Watch section to view shows.

Right now, the vast majority of Watch viewing happens inside the news feed, according to four media companies that have sold shows to Facebook. When users follow a particular show, new episodes are then seeded inside the news feed like content from any other Facebook page that a user might follow.

“No one’s going to the Watch tab; no one’s going to your Facebook page, either,” said a publishing executive. “And that’s the issue; if our videos are not going to show up in the news feed, how are we going to get people to go over to Watch?”

Facebook has been experimenting with a few tools designed to get people to go to Watch. For instance, when a user follows a show, they will see a red notification when a new episode is available. Shows can also be featured at the top of the production company’s or media brand’s Facebook page, which usually have larger followings than Watch pages dedicated to individual shows.

But both of these tools have been available since Watch launched in August, and neither has helped create a habit among most Facebook users to go to Watch for the latest programming, multiple Watch partners said.

Yet there is some hope that Facebook won’t completely cut off Watch programming from the news feed.

“Facebook has made it clear that they want to reward intentional viewing and deprioritize accidental or passive viewing,” said a second Watch partner. “The whole philosophy behind Watch is intentional viewing: It’s more premium, well-produced video that’s meant to elicit a stronger reaction and repeated viewership from Facebook’s audience.”

Other Watch partners said Facebook has told them it will favor videos and shows that users choose to watch, with the thinking that this would make them more likely to show up in the news feed. Facebook already favors Watch shows that have repeat viewership, which indicates people are choosing to watch the show. That’s a type of engagement that Facebook would support, along with programming that viewers interact with in some fashion. (Facebook is also testing a new feature called Watch Party, which allows mul-tiple users to watch and interact with video at the same time.)

Another view is that whatever happens to the news feed, Facebook has committed enough resources to Watch and video in general that it’s not likely to kill it just five months after launching, said one Watch partner. This is even after what many consider to be a misfire by Facebook to kick-start Watch with cheap and unscripted short-form shows.

“There is really no logic to them shuttering

Watch at this point in time,” said the second Watch partner. “They wouldn’t have hired the executives that they have. I don’t think Facebook is going to be fickle about their long-term play in Watch.”

The hope for Facebook and its media part-ners is that Facebook can develop another YouTube-esque platform where users actively go to watch videos. Under this scenario, Facebook would likely spin off Watch into its own app — similar to what the company did with Facebook Messenger once it hit a critical mass. Facebook already has a dedicated video app for connected TVs, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that app is available across platforms in the form of a spun-off Watch app.

But that’s merely fantasy until Facebook can convince its users that it, too, is a video platform.

“At the end of the day, Watch has yet to become a thing,” said an executive at a TV and digital media giant. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done before we can tell you whether we’re bearish or bullish on it.”

One point made by several Watch partners is how little Facebook’s algorithm change will affect how much they’re making from their Watch shows. There are two primary ways for video makers to earn money on Watch: getting Facebook or an advertiser to fund the show. In both instances, creators can turn a profit off of the production margin — and in Facebook’s case, if the show makes more

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money from pre-roll and mid-roll ad revenue than it cost to produce, creators get 55 cents of every additional dollar made.

Facebook’s ad program has not driven any meaningful revenue for most media partners, though, which means the only dollars that vid-eo creators see is from the margin they bake into a show’s budget. Some Watch partners also have the opportunity to make additional money by redistributing the show on other platforms after Facebook’s exclusivity runs out, but even here, Facebook is pursuing stricter deal terms that either give it longer periods of exclusivity or total ownership of the show.

There is some hope on the horizon: Face-book is warming to the idea of letting media partners sell their own ad inventory, including that available inside Watch programming — something many partners have pressured Facebook to do for months. This would allow media companies to sell broader, multiplat-form ad packages that could include sponsor-ships and ad slots inside Watch programming, according to one Watch publisher, which

previously was able to sell sponsorship for one of its Facebook-funded Watch shows but was rebuffed by Facebook.

“When someone makes that kind of pivot or acknowledgement, then it’s easier for us to lean in because they eliminated that friction,” said the TV and digital media executive. “Think about where Hulu used to be and where it is today: Hulu used to be about [selling] Hulu [ad inventory] first; then they realized they probably have a greater chance at success by giving media companies more flexibility to monetize their shows.”

The common refrain among most media exec-utives is that Facebook has the money and the power to do anything it sets its mind to. But it’s set its mind to video for several years now, and the company hasn’t had much to show outside of a few viral video clips and the LaVar Ball-starring “Ball in the Family,” which many industry sources consider to be the sole hit out of Facebook’s initial crop of funded shows.

If publishers are less willing to give Facebook

a long leash after its decision to nuke the news feed, the video creators making shows for Watch will arrive at a similar decision at some point. Privately, some Watch partners are will-ing to acknowledge that making Watch shows is driven by Facebook’s willingness to pay for it — not because they’re certain Watch is the next big thing in video.

“Honestly, I’m very down on it,” said the first Facebook Watch partner. “I just don’t see people on Facebook caring about long-form shows, and I don’t know how many people anyone can convince to do that [on Face-book].”

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PUBLISHING ON FACEBOOK ‘HE’S NOT A PR GUY’: ADAM MOSSERI, FACEBOOK’S HEAD OF NEWS FEED, HAS BECOME AN UNLIKELY GOOD GUY TO PUBLISHERSBY LUCIA MOSES

Publishers that find themselves at the end of their rope with Facebook have found favor with one person there: Adam Mosseri.

Mosseri, 35, has been at Facebook about 10 years, serving as product vp for the last two. His main responsibility is the news feed, the core of most users’ experience on Facebook and therefore the main distribution artery for publisher content. The spotlight has been on the news feed in recent months, first with Facebook acknowledging it was testing a newsless news feed in six countries outside the U.S., then announcing earlier this month that it would deprioritize news content in the feed and use user surveys to help decide which news sources are legitimate.

Those moves have thrust Mosseri into the spotlight, as he’s written blog posts about the changes, given interviews to the likes of Wired and others and gone back and forth with journalists and publishing folk on Twitter, where his candor and willingness to engage have won him fans in the publishing crowd.

On Twitter, a platform known for bringing out the worst in people (and not his own company’s platform), Mosseri comes off as exceedingly polite, responsive to problems and self-deprecating. Mosseri reports to Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer, who’s just one rung down from CEO Mark Zucker-berg and has hundreds of people under him just on the news-feed team. That matters to publishers, which are used to being handled

by a partnerships team they doubt has lots of sway at headquarters.

“Adam is willing to come on our turf and engage us where we are,” said Ben Smith, ed-itor-in-chief of BuzzFeed. “He’s not a PR guy.”

Mosseri’s goodwill tour comes at a time when publishers feel they have few allies at the plat-form, from Zuckerberg on down. Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partner-ships, was brought on ostensibly to improve relationships with news outlets, but many feel the results of her main initiative, the Facebook Journalism Project, have been mixed and see her as sticking to the Facebook public rela-tions script. Dan Rose, vp of partnerships, has a big constituency, of which publishers are just one small part. (Facebook wouldn’t make Mosseri available for comment for this article.)

“[Mosseri is] the only Facebook exec anybody can stand talking to because he seems not to lie all the time,” fumed a publishing exec.

Mosseri has gained visibility over the past year, showing up at publisher events and newsrooms as part of the Facebook Journal-ism Project. He’s known as not just a good listener, but someone with real pull within Facebook and who is willing to go beyond common Facebook talking points.

“He has a stunning capacity to not come across as defensive at all,” said Vivian Schiller, a former NPR and Twitter news exec who’s

seen Mosseri in person at a handful of events. “He’s calm, steady, comes across with authority and knowledge and has incredible credibility because he is in charge of the news feed. It’s a fine line between acknowledging there are issues but without taking too much of the blame. And he manages to do that.”

At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, last year, he surprised listeners by speaking openly about changes Facebook was thinking about making to the news feed. “He said, ‘I’m sharing this with great reluc-tance because we don’t usually talk about things we’re thinking about because they might shift course,’” Schiller said. “I appreciat-ed that he said that, as opposed to, ‘You’ll be the first to know.’ It was very unplatform-like.”

Facebook, along with other tech companies, has been blasted for its lack of transparency, especially when it comes to how it decides how it orders the news feed, but Mosseri of-fers a sharp contrast. On Twitter, his exchang-es function to explain Facebook’s thinking to the journalist, engineering and audience de-velopment world, which he can do because he comes from a position of credibility.

“I’ve tweeted Adam with specific problems, questions about major changes to news-feed rankings and even looped him into prob-lems I’ve seen other people on my timeline raising,” said Ziad Ramley, a digital news consultant and former social lead at Al Jazeera English. “Ninety percent of the time, he

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responds quickly, even on weekends. If you’ve followed him on Twitter for a significant length of time, you’ll regularly see him responding to tagged posts or big articles about Facebook in the media. Sometimes, his responses feel like official Facebook PR, but for the most part, they seem genuine. I don’t know other Face-book people who are so senior and so open to having real, public discussions with critics.”

“He seems to be the only person functioning in this semiofficial capacity, like a back-end communication source for Facebook,” said Aram Zucker-Scharff, ad engineering direc-tor at The Washington Post. “He’s an ideal ambassador. He’s in the company but not too high up; he understands the core problem; he seems to be on top of the editorial and engineering concerns. If there’s one thing I’d criticize is, and there are limitations on Twitter, but I wish there could be more detail on the whys.”

If there are other criticisms of Mosseri, it’s that if he doesn’t break promises, he also doesn’t solve publishers’ problems. And that’s no sur-prise: Facebook has clearly decided the news feed’s reason for being is to promote so-called meaningful user interaction, not solve publish-ers’ distribution and monetization needs.

“I’ve never met him. He’s never called or emailed me,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Dig-ital Content Next, a trade group for digital publishers. “That’s all you need to know about

him. At this level of problem and the concerns we expressed, it would have been expected he would call or email. His tweets were simply replies to comments along with the rest of the public. I’m not criticizing him personally, just saying when something is a priority, it’s a prior-ity. This hasn’t been.”

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At the Digiday Publishing Summit, we surveyed 49 publisher executives on their companies’s approaches to making money in the era of the duopoly. Here are their responses.

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