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December 4, 2018 03:54 pm PST

Facebook made itself indispensable to media companies, "pivoted to video," changed its mind, and triggered a industrywide mass extinction event

From the beginning, Facebook's strategy was to build a walled-garden-cum-roach-motel content and users checked in, but they never checked out, so over time, everyone and everything was captured within the site, and a prisoner of the whims of its algorithms.

As media companies became totally dependent on being upranked by Facebook's algorithm, they practiced a kind of Kremlinology, poring over the utterances of Facebook execs; and this was compounded by the gambler's fallacy that the site cultivates by having the inscrutable judgments of the algorithm randomly turn seemingly undistinguished posts into massive viral hits, like a slot machine ringing the cherries.

Then came the day that Facebook announced the "pivot to video," a rare, clear, ringing instruction to the media companies: MAKE VIDEO. Video: the most expensive, difficult-to-skim content there is, and there'd better be a lot of it.

Companies fired their print writers and hired video makers, tooled up, borrowed or sold equity to build out the video capacity, made capital and employment decisions that would take years and years to pay off. Facebook had better not pivot away from video!

Then they did.

The fuckery compounded by fuckery with fuckery heaped atop it has done in so many media companies, and they're still dropping. Mic just fired 100 people and sold off the company name for $5 mil -- having raised $60 mil, mostly with the promise of making videos to fulfill Facebook's imperial decree.

Why did Facebook pivot away from video? It wasn't sadism. It wasn't merely indifference. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/lK1RqksslaU/fraudulent-viewer-numbers.html

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