February 8, 2024 • 41 mins
Back in 2015, Facebook made a claim that would lead advertisers and content creators to shift focus to online video. There was one problem -- the claim ended up being bogus. How did the pivot to video strategy become a dark, grim joke in the tech sector?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Heydarren, Welcome
to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an
executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? Friends?
Let me tell you a story. It's a sad story,
(00:26):
and for folks like me, it's also a scary story.
Anyone who was in online writing or online journalism found
it to be a scary story. It's also a tale
that gets us angry because at the heart of it
were lies, or at least mistakes that a platform told
to advertisers in an effort to get more money. But
(00:49):
those lies or mistakes helped justify some really harmful decisions
across multiple companies. So we're talking about the infamous pivot
to video. Now, to understand pivot to video, we actually
need to set the stage a little bit. So first up,
let's talk about the business of online content. For most outlets,
(01:12):
revenue comes from advertising. The online platform sets aside certain
landscape upon which advertisers can place clients' ads, and these
may be static or dynamic, meaning if it's static, you're
going to see the same ad every single time you
go to that piece of content. If it's dynamic, then
it could change out right, and it'll change out depending
(01:34):
upon an algorithm that's trying to make sure that each
ad that's been sold is getting the number of eyeballs
that were promised. The whole business of online advertising gets
really complicated, and I've covered it elsewhere, so we're not
going to dive into it too much. Just know that
online ads were the big, big revenue source. You know,
some platforms experimented with paywalls and subscriptions, but very few
(01:58):
of those worked. All touch on that again later. Now. Ideally,
the people who are actually behind making the content, you know,
the writers and the editors, they don't need to be
concerned with any of that. That's not their job. They
go on writing and editing. The journalists do their investigative work,
and they identify leads, and they follow up with those leads,
(02:19):
and they check sources, and generally they do the very
hard work the journalists do in order to get the
truth out to the public. Folks who are like me,
whom I would classify myself as a writer, not a journalist.
I didn't have it nearly as tough as journalists do.
Like I don't want to give anyone any feelings that
somehow my job was as tough as being an investigative journalist.
(02:42):
It certainly wasn't. But you know, we also have to
do things like we have to research, and we have
to check sources, and we have to make reasonably sure
that the stuff that we're writing is accurate. You know,
our reputations are on the line, and our jobs are
often on the line. But I would say the lift
is lighter to journalists, at least in my opinion, in
my experience, based upon what I know now, good writers
(03:05):
should command a decent salary, and good journalists definitely should
command a good salary. They possess talents and skills that
aren't necessarily universal. It's not like you could just fire
somebody and hire some random person off the street and
get the same result. Right, to be a good journalist
or a good writer requires a lot of dedication. It
(03:26):
requires skill and talent and practice, and without these things,
the quality of the overall site would become garbage. Now,
it wouldn't necessarily be worth advertising on either, right, Like,
if the quality of the site goes down and that
means fewer people go to it, then advertisers don't want
to put ads on that site. It doesn't make sense
(03:47):
that those ads aren't going to be seen, so why bother. However,
we all know that sometimes garbage can have an appeal
of its own that will continue to draw visitors. Just
because something is low in quality doesn't mean it's unpoppulsler.
And also just because something is high quality doesn't mean
that it's sought after. This is just the nature of
(04:07):
our world. So sometimes you can create garbage and do
really well if it's garbage that people are interested in. Anyway,
running a content site that's staffed by like salaried writers
and editors gets to be really expensive because that's a
lot of salaries, and the work can be slow, particularly
for those who are working on in depth pieces in
(04:30):
which journalists are you know, having to follow up on
all those pesky leads and loose ends. That kind of
thing takes time, and that might mean that you could
be waiting a while for the next piece to be
ready for publication. You're not churning out content, you're not
a content farm. Meanwhile, you still have to keep paying
this yutz who's working on this really in depth piece
(04:52):
for all their work. It ain't hardly fair right, because
you know they're still haven't actually published the thing. That's
my guess as to how certain online content platform owners
think that you know, it ain't hardly fair that we
have to pay them even though they haven't published their
article yet. Of course, maybe you can cut back on
the costs by going with freelance writers, you know, because
(05:13):
you only pay freelance writers when they turn in a
finished piece. You'll still need an editorial staff, likely a
salaried editorial staff, but you don't need to hold on
to a staff of salaried writers if you're just dependent
upon freelancers. Now you might find it challenging to reach
a consistent level of quality. But there are some very good,
very accomplished freelancers out there who are just as good
(05:35):
as any salaried writer, or even better in some cases.
So hopefully you can attract some of those to write
for you. If not, well, you can hope that the
folks you do get are good enough, or that your
editorial staff can maybe hush things up if the articles
are perhaps a little below standard. But at any rate,
you can bring down some of the costs that way
(05:57):
by not having salaried writing staff. Meanwhile, the other thing
that you're concerned with, or perhaps obsessed with, is SEO,
which stands for Search engine optimization. So why would you
be obsessed with SEO. Well, for years, the primary source
of traffic for many websites, not all of them, but
many of them would be search engines. So of course
(06:20):
when I say search engines, I really mean Google. Yes,
there are other search engines out there. Some people exclusively
use other search engines, but Google is by far the
dominant search engine on the web. So ranking high in
Google search engines is really important because if you're below
say the first several results, or worse yet, if you
(06:42):
show up after page one, you're just not going to
get very much traffic from those search engines. Folks tend
to follow the top links that are listed. Most will
not go beyond the first page, and quite a few
won't go quote unquote below the fold, which means they'll
click on something they can see upon getting their search
(07:02):
results without having to scroll down the page at all.
So part of your strategy is to identify stuff that
people are searching for and then to create content that
meets those needs. Or better yet, you figure out what
folks are going to be searching for tomorrow and then
you get the jump on everyone else. So you hire
some SEO consultants to help you optimize your site. Maybe
(07:26):
you're throwing in a bunch of meta data and such
to give you the best chance to rank high on
Google's search results. And you either don't think about or
you push aside the concern that should Google adjust its
approach to search results, you'll be back at square one,
because that's a thing. Google changes its algorithm every so often.
(07:46):
Those changes could mean that you go from having a
healthy flow of visitors because you rank really high on
the list, or you go down to a trickle because
suddenly there's a change in the algorithm and now you're
not appearing on page one anymore. And that's really scary, right.
You could be spending tons of money to rank high
(08:07):
on lists, only for Google to change things and you're
worse off than you were before. Of course, your ideal
situation is to convince folks to come to your site
all on their own, just to go straight to your site,
not to get there via search engine, and that means
you have to create a site that is a destination
in itself. So instead of going to Google and searching
(08:29):
for some random topic and just so happens that you
have covered that topic on your site and people come
to you that way. These people are coming straight to
your page just to see what you've posted and maybe
see if there's something interesting that they want to look at.
Maybe even scroll around and look through archives to see
if there's old stuff that they want to read. That
is the dream to create a site that is so
(08:51):
inviting and so interesting that people go to it just
on their own, but for an awful lot of sites
out there, it remains a dream. Only a small percentage
of your visitors may be coming to your site just
to see what you've posted. Most are likely finding you
by following a link from a search results page. Another
thing that was changing at this time was online video.
(09:13):
So YouTube had launched back in two thousand and five,
and it wasn't the first online video platform, but obviously
it's the one that has become the most famous, and
it was in twenty eleven when things really started to
change quite a bit with online video. So twenty eleven
is the year when YouTube acquired a company that was
called Next New Networks. One of the folks who co
(09:36):
founded that company, Jed Simmons envisioned a new kind of
business on YouTube that he called a multi channel network.
This wasn't so much as new as it was newly defined.
So a multi channel network describes a company that owns
and operates multiple channels on YouTube. The company is in
charge of programming and content, meaning it's not just an
(09:56):
organization that aggregates existing channels that each operate more or
less independently of one another. So this is kind of
similar to how cable television works. For example, back in
the day, Discovery Incorporated, which is now part of Warner Brothers.
Discovery owned and operated cable channels like Discovery, the Science Channel, TLC,
the Food Network, Animal Planet, and you know, like around
(10:19):
a dozen more channels. So on top of the multi
channel network strategy, YouTube pushed for content creators to do
their thing over on YouTube itself, to adopt YouTube as
a home base, and the company set aside a cool
one hundred million bucks to help new original channels get
off the ground. These included original channels like Geek and Sundry,
(10:40):
The Onion, and THENOC. The initiative would last about a
year and a half or so, at which point YouTube
quietly removed all references to this initiative and had reportedly
cut funding for more than half of the launched channels
because they just weren't performing to the level that was
needed in order to recoup the cost of investment. So
we see the dangers in relying upon a third party
(11:02):
when it comes to making content, because if that third
party suddenly decides to change something, suddenly you don't have
a home anymore. Then in the mid twenty tens, things
were really changing quite a bit. Search results were starting
to matter less, which wasn't necessarily a good thing for
those content platforms that depended upon traffic from Google, and instead,
(11:23):
social networks were beginning to matter more. People were saying, oh, well,
they go to their social networks and that's where they
get their news. They'll see something posted on Facebook, for example,
or Twitter, and then they'll follow up on it there
rather than going to a search engine or to a
content site directly. So friends would click on links and
(11:44):
content would go viral through people sharing on places like
Facebook or Twitter, and this meant that SEO would become
less important, and now content providers had to figure out
how could they create the kinds of content that would
do well on social media, which is a totally different skill,
Like you have to think in a different way for
something to do well on a social platform versus to
(12:08):
rank well in search. The writers and editors who just
wanted to do you a good job, they just wanted
to do work and to make a living off of
doing work, they would get jerked around quite a bit.
The types of content and the style of writing would change,
sometimes drastically, in an effort to cater to what does
(12:28):
well on social networks. This is where we started to
see the real embrace of lists and listicles, because lists
tend to do pretty well on social network or at
least they did at the time, and it was the worst.
Like if you were someone who was really dedicated to writing,
getting an assignment to write a list could be really depressing.
(12:50):
I mean, there were people who did amazing jobs at it.
I know writers who did fantastic jobs at creating lists,
but from my perspective, my experience, it was just far
less satisfying to have to do a list as opposed
to a quote unquote normal article. Some sites really excelled
at getting traction on social networks, like BuzzFeed was pretty
(13:11):
darn good at it. And others rarely saw very much success.
Like you would try, like you seem to be doing
what everyone else was doing, but you just weren't necessarily
getting much traction. And so by twenty fifteen, content sites
were starting to put most of their eggs in the
social network basket. And I'm reminded of a conversation I
once had with Bernie Burns, one of the founders of
(13:32):
the media company Rooster Teeth. So Bernie told me that
he felt a key component to success on the Internet
if you're a content company is that you always maintain
your own platform, and you can show up on other platforms, right.
You can show up on YouTube, you can show up
on Facebook, but you always need to maintain your own
home and never fully commit to someone else's site as
(13:56):
being your base of operations, because if that other entity
does change things, you're up the creek. Kind of like
how content sites had optimized for one Google search algorithm
and then had to scramble and Google changed things up,
Or like how those original channels on YouTube had to
shut down once YouTube pulled the plug on the experiment. Now,
(14:16):
on the one hand, maybe those channels never would have
had a shot without YouTube's help in the first place,
so you could argue that they really didn't lose much
because they never would have had the opportunity without it anyway.
But on the other hand, once the third party shuts
off the support, the media company more often than not
had to fold. Okay, we're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, i'll talk more about the dreaded
(14:38):
pivot to video, but first a word from our sponsors. Okay,
we're back, and we've got a bunch of content sites
out there that are hanging on social networks to a
dangerous degree. The revenue models are such that the owners
(15:00):
of these sites are always looking for ways to reduce costs.
And then we finally get to the disastrous pivot to
video moment. And a few things would feed into this.
One is the perception that video is more nimble than
having to depend on written content. You can be more
fast and loose with video than you can with articles.
(15:23):
You can write and shoot a whole bunch of episodes
in a day, you can bank a bunch of content,
or more likely, you can release the content at a
regular pace, only to do it all again the next day.
And starting from scratch and making video is tough. You
could have a very small team doing it, but you know,
hats off to everyone on that team. I have worked
(15:44):
in this space a bit, and I can tell you that,
in my opinion, the talent on screen, the person you're
seeing in the video, typically has the easiest job, particularly
if they're not the one who had to write the
copy in the first place, like some people who appear
on the video. They're the ones who did all the
research and and that's a ton of work, but not
all the time. So back when I worked at houstuffworks
(16:05):
dot com, I would occasionally get pulled in to shoot
videos that were written by other people because we were
just as much affected by this pivot to video as
a lot of other sites. So a great example of
this is one of the most popular videos that featured yours. Truly,
I've been in some videos that went pretty viral, but
I think this one might be one of the top ones.
(16:25):
And it's a video that's titled why do People in
Old Movies Talk Weird? It's still up on YouTube if
you want to check it out. It has more than
five million views, which isn't too shabby. Now, obviously, that's
nowhere close to being even remotely one of the more
popular videos on the platform. Right, five million is big
for me, it's not big for like the truly huge
(16:48):
creators out there anyway. Ben Bolin, my arch nemesis, actually
wrote that episode. I did not. I threw in an
improvised line at the very end of the video about
Rigi races, but that was about it anyway. All I
really had to do was I had to show up,
and I had to read my lines off of a teleprompter.
And I'm pretty good at that. I'm pretty good at
(17:10):
reading off a teleprompter, and I can do it well
enough where it can come across naturally, like it doesn't
necessarily sound like I'm reading off a teleprompter, and I
can typically get through a video in just one or
sometimes two takes. They called me one take Strickland back
in the day, but for everyone else who was working
on that team, it was a lot more work. Like again,
(17:31):
I had the easiest job, but you got the writer Ben.
In this case, Ben had to research and write the
piece and then cut it down so that it could
fit a particular format. It didn't need to go too long,
but it needed to be informative enough to justify its existence.
You've got the tech crew. They have to make sure
that the sound and the video and the lights and
all of that are working properly, and that I look
(17:53):
as good as I possibly can on a camera. There's
only so much you can do, but you get the idea.
And then you've got the poor editor whose job is
to take all this footage and then combine it with
you know, other stuff like stock footage, and to get
it ready for publication. So my heart really goes out
to the editors. They often were be absolutely slammed with work.
You know, as soon as they finished one piece they
had to jump on another one. I don't know how
(18:14):
they did it and kept their sanity. Anyway, with a
relatively small team, you could churn out a whole lot
of content. Now let's get back to another big component,
the perception that video brings in more ad revenue. I
think you could reasonably argue this perception is what led
to a whole lot of great writers and editors losing
their jobs. And it all starts with a lie, or
(18:37):
at the very least, a huge mistake. So the year
is twenty fifteen, and here in the United States we
were heading into an election year. It seems like we're
always doing that, but you know, twenty fifteen, we're getting
ready for the twenty sixteen election year. That was a
year that promised to be a real doozy, and it
sure as heck was. And there was obviously a glut
(18:58):
of content coming in from new use pieces, to opinion pieces,
to misinformation campaigns, to all the types of stuff that
folks produce whether it's an election year or not. And
Mark Zuckerberg was going around evangelizing the future was video,
So he was making the rounds kind of lack a
Bible thump and travel and revival. Sorry that's my rural
(19:20):
Georgian coming out of me. Anyway. He was telling various
organizations that, based on Facebook's research, online video was where
it was at. Engagement with your plain old text and
image content was on the decline. Reach was diminishing for
these content companies, but video was a different story. So,
according to Facebook's analysis, users were far more likely to
(19:42):
watch and engage with video than other types of content
while on Facebook. In fact, they were likely to pause
a video so that they could watch the whole thing
rather than just nope out of it. If you know,
something came up like, you know, if they got a
notification or something. This was music to advertisers' ears. After all,
advertisers spend an awful lot of money to get their
(20:05):
ads placed so that users can potentially see them, but
the advertisers never get any assurance that the user will
you know, actually see the ads or pay attention to them.
So a lot of us have developed ad blindness over
the years. And then quite a few folks have ad
blockers installed on their browsers so that they don't have
to even develop ad blindness because the app does it
(20:28):
for them. But if people are watching videos, well that's
potentially a great place to put ads. And according to Facebook,
you know, people were watching an awful lot of videos,
that this was the way of the future, that soon
the majority of content on Facebook would be in video format. Meanwhile,
content companies started to say, oh, that's where all the
(20:49):
money's going to go. That's where all the advertising money
is going to go, is to video, because advertisers are
being told this is what is the important content. So
if we want to get adverts tizing money, which is
the source of our revenue, we need to make sure
that we're in the business of creating video, which also
means we can downsize our editorial department and instead of
having this big editorial staff with editors and writers, we
(21:12):
can have a small video team that generates just a
ton of videos. We'll reduce costs and will generate more revenue.
So that seems like an ideal situation. And then we
started to see layoffs across the web in various editorial departments.
I mean it was brutal. You know, company after company
was laying off writers and editors. It was just a
(21:34):
terrible thing to see. The message seemed to be that
search engine traffic was a dying source of visitors and
that social networks were in fact the future and you
had to get on that train. And further that you
really wanted to host stuff on those social networks natively
in order to get the most out of it. So
the perception was if you hosted a video on your
(21:55):
own site. So let's say it's house stuff Works. Let's
say we post a video to how stuff works done,
and then we link to that video on housetuffworks dot
com through a Facebook page. Right, we have the house
Stuffworks Facebook page. Well, the perception was you would not
get very much help from Facebook, you wouldn't get much
promotion and so not that many people would see it,
(22:16):
which means it wouldn't get a lot of engagement, which
means it wouldn't go viral. But if instead you created
that page on Facebook, so you have your house, stuffworks
page on Facebook, and then you started to upload videos
directly into Facebook itself, so that all the traffic is
going to the Facebook version of the video, not the
one that's hosted on your home site, well then the
(22:38):
all powerful Facebook algorithm would make sure that your video's
got a wider distribution so that there was a better
chance then more folks would see it and that it
could potentially go viral. Not a guarantee, but a better
chance than if you were just posting a link. So
the message was you've got to shift a video and
you've got to host your stuff on the social networks
(22:59):
them selves. You know, two things that ended up not
being the best advice. And there was a real problem
with all of this. It's that the information that the
advertisers got was was based on a lie, or at
the very least it was based on a mistake. Now
I can't say for sure that the folks in Facebook
were knowingly promoting an untruth to advertisers and content creators.
(23:24):
Facebook denies that that was ever the case. They said
that at the time they made a mistake and they
misstated the engagement levels with video, and that it was
all just based on an innocent mistake. It wasn't an
intentional thing at all. But you know, you could just
argue someone forgot to carry the one or something. But anyway,
(23:44):
according to various sources, Facebook exaggerated the engagement statistics to
a significant degree, Like sixty to eighty percent is what
was the initially believed. Later on there were arguments that
that was closer to between one hundred and fifty to
nine hundred percent. I don't know what the actual the
actual figure is, but let's just say that what Facebook
(24:08):
was telling advertisers back in twenty fifteen was absolutely not true.
And the truth was that video wasn't doing that great
on Facebook. It's not like it was, you know, the
worst thing ever, but it wasn't going like gangbusters the
way Facebook had implied. And apparently when Facebook was factoring
(24:28):
how much people were watching video, the problem was they
were counting videos that were on auto play. That when
people were just scrolling through their feed. If a video
came up as they were scrolling, the video automatically started playing,
and if it played for three seconds or longer, then
it counted toward engagement. If it didn't play for three seconds,
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then it wasn't counted. It didn't it wasn't counted against it,
It wasn't counted at all. So it was like cherry
picking and cherry picking incidents that may not indicate that
anyone's watching video at all. Let's say that I'm scrolling
down and I scrolled down and then there's a friend
of mine has posted something some in text, and I'm
just reading the text. Meanwhile below that post is a
(25:10):
little video that's on auto play, and it's going as
I'm reading the text and not paying any attention at
all to the video. Well, Facebook was counting that as
if I were intently watching the video, which means that
advertisers being told that all these people are watching tons
of video on Facebook, when in fact, no, it's just
that tons of video was playing on Facebook. Whether people
(25:31):
were watching it or not was a totally different matter.
But the problem was you had all these advertisers who
were shifting their ad revenue budgets to support video content.
And then that meant that you had all these media
companies and content creators completely uprooting their business model, totally
decimating their editorial departments in order to go where the
(25:53):
money was, right, Like, it doesn't make sense to keep
writing great content if you're not going to get any
ads placed against it, because you're not going to make
any money, and ultimately you'll go out of business, Like
there's no there's no grant or anything that's going to
keep you going just because you happen to be writing
great content. So you have to move to where the
(26:15):
money is. The money was in video. So everyone was
suffering for this, right You had people who were losing
their jobs because they were writers or editors. You had
the media companies that were suffering because it turned out
that these videos weren't going crazy viral the way Facebook
was suggesting. The advertisers were losing because people weren't actually
(26:36):
watching the ads the way that they thought was going
to happen. Facebook was losing because when people found out
about this, it did not look good for the company.
Like nobody nobody came out great for this. So even
the video teams, which were had steady employment right, Like,
they didn't have to worry about hitting unemployment the way
the writers and editors were. They were hurt too because
(27:00):
they were frequently working in a constant crunch that just
demanded that they immediately moved to the next video as
soon as they finished the previous one. And I've been
in a similar situation, I can tell you it is
exhausting and it is demoralizing. In fact, some folks that
I really respect actually left the field around this time
because of these issues. They were like, that's it. I'm
going to go find a job in a totally different
(27:22):
field because this is killing me. Now. The world would
find out that Facebook had at the very least done
goofed up a couple of years after they were really
pushing for this, like in late twenty sixteen, really, but
in twenty fifteen. In most of twenty sixteen, things were
shifting massively toward video. Once the smoke cleared and the
(27:42):
ad world discovered that they had been sold a business
model based on an incorrect analysis, the lawsuits poured in
and they cited internal Facebook documents that had been leaked.
These internal documents implied folks within the company had figured
out that there was this mistake, that it did appear
to be a miss it wasn't like an intentional lie,
(28:03):
but that the mistake had been discovered, and then the
decision had been made to cover that up, to hide
it from the public, to not admit to this mistake,
which is arguably as bad as just an outright lie
in the first place. And Facebook executives claim that no
one on their side deliberately misled any of the ad companies,
(28:23):
which I find challenging to believe, but maybe it's true. However,
in twenty nineteen, Facebook agreed to a settlement with these
advertising companies without actually admitting fault. By that time, even
more shenanigans were causing problems. I'll explain what I mean
by that, but first we're going to take another quick
break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back, and yes,
(28:55):
it gets worse. So the online content world is an upheaval.
Not every online platform completely throws in with the pivot
to video strategy, but a lot of them did, and
the phrase pivot to video began to kind of become
gallows humor. It was a euphemism for stuff like layoffs
(29:15):
and a decline in content quality over time, it was
pretty grim stuff Like if you said pivot to video,
you're kind of saying, yeah, the quality of that site
has really gone downhill over the last few years. That
management has made some very short sighted decisions based on
bad information. That's kind of what it became over time.
(29:37):
But what made this even worse was once again Facebook.
So here you have this platform which claims for a
couple of years that the future is all video, and
that within a few years practically every post on Facebook
will be video in some way, which prompts, obviously everyone
to rush toward adopting the video format. Then came the
(30:00):
concept of meaningful Social interactions or MSI, which sounds like
a Law and Order spin off, doesn't it. But meaningful
social interactions referred to an attempt to emphasize interactions between
a user and that user's friends and family, which on
the surface level you can kind of understand, right because
(30:23):
early Facebook people, a lot of people are like, man,
I really miss what Facebook used to be, where you
would log in and you would see, essentially in reverse
chronological order, the posts that your friends had made on
the platform, so at the top of the most recent
posts and you would scroll down, and you would keep
scrolling till you started to see stuff that you had
seen before, and you're like, okay, I'm all caught up.
(30:44):
And it was just your friends, and it was everything
they posted right, like, you weren't missing out on stuff.
It wasn't like Facebook was deciding which of your friend's
posts you would see and which ones you wouldn't see.
But eventually Facebook adopted algorithms that very much determined what
you would see. And it wasn't always from your friends
and family. It was often from lots of times advertisers
(31:09):
or stuff that Facebook algorithm assumed you would be interested
in in an effort to keep you engaged, to keep
you on the platform for as long as was possible.
So part of the issue was that Facebook determined, after
a couple of years of experimenting with this, that you know,
people aren't super crazy about just seeing random stuff created
(31:32):
by you know, like professional content media companies or whatever.
They really want to see what their friends and family
are up to. This feels like it was the most
obvious information that was out there, and yet Facebook's like, hey,
this is what we've discovered. So the idea of Facebook
had was that people would stay on Facebook longer if
they saw that the content on their feeds related to
(31:54):
the people who are actually in their lives. Go figure again,
seems like a pretty obvious thing to me. So you're
more likely to see a post from your uncle ted
pop up than just from some random video from some
random media company because Facebook now wanted to emphasize these
meaningful social interactions. But the shift to MSI meant that
(32:17):
Facebook was purposefully moving away from promoting videos from these
media companies, you know, the same media companies that Facebook
had convinced to shift to video just a couple of
years earlier, and to post those videos directly into Facebook itself. Essentially,
Facebook had convinced an entire industry to change how it
(32:40):
did business, and now Facebook was saying, yeah, we're not
going to promote your stuff anymore, Like we're going to
make sure algorithm isn't like emphasizing your content because it
turns out that's not what people want. It's what we
said people wanted, it's what we convinced advertisers that people wanted,
but it turns out no, it's not actually what people wanted.
(33:00):
So uh yeah, we're sorry, but uh yeah, we're not
gonna We're not gonna help you all out anymore. So
now you have these media companies with their stripped down staff,
this small skeleton crew that's killing themselves to publish multiple
videos a day to a Facebook page, and then Facebook
itself is limiting the reach of the videos that this
(33:22):
team is creating. The value proposition these companies were built
on just withered away. Content could still see widespread distribution
like that could still happen, but only if it was
driving a lot of engagement early on. And the stuff
that typically drove tons of engagement was the more extreme
stuff like not your typical news videos or whatever it was,
(33:45):
videos that got people angry. Those did really well because
people would engage with them. And you know, videos that
would pit one group against another, those did pretty well too. Essentially,
the videos that played to the worst of our tendencies
were the one ones that were most likely to go
viral and drive engagement. Now this meant that the content
companies got the message of if you want your videos
(34:08):
to do well, you got to rile people up. There
was even less of a place for valuable journalism or
creative videos. You might come up with something charming and
entertaining and informative, but it was far less likely to
get as many views as something that was controversial, mean spirited,
and you know, maybe even a lie. So you didn't
(34:28):
have to bother making sure that anything you claimed was
true or accurate. That was way less important than just
grabbing attention. So these ugly videos started to get a
lot of engagement, and that just meant that more folks
would see them and then interact with them, and that
meant that even more folks would see them and interact
with them, and so on. So it became this vicious
cycle that rewarded some of the worst content at the
(34:49):
expense of everything else. Now, I often argue that we
can't just jump to the conclusion that Facebook is actively
harming mental health. That is often a claim, and I say,
we can't jump to that conclusion. But I do think
you can make a decent argument that Facebook's policies and
algorithms facilitate the spread of content that is detrimental to
(35:10):
mental health. So maybe I'm being too kind. I think
the problem is a pretty complicated one. Anyway, The whole
shift to MSI was like a rug pull on these
media companies, and it again reinforced the advice that Bernie
Burns had years earlier that depending upon a third party
for stability is an inherently dangerous proposition because whenever that
(35:32):
third party makes a change in how it operates, it
can drastically affect your ability to do business. Such was
the way of Facebook. The nasty consequences of all this
is that even more folks got laid off because Facebook
changed tactics again, and now media companies were seeing that
their reach had been greatly diminished, so they didn't generate
(35:53):
as much revenue, which meant they needed to lay people
off as a result. So if you've wondered why online
content from certain media companies just doesn't feel the same
as it used to, this is one of the reasons.
Now another reason involves experimentations with AI, because companies like
c net and even my former employer, HowStuffWorks dot Com
(36:13):
have occasionally relied on AI to generate content, and that
can be really disheartening, particularly if you consider how it
declined in journalism and writing means that we have less
reliable and insightful information at our fingertips. This means we
become less equipped to understand the world around us and
(36:34):
what's going on and how perhaps we should comport ourselves
in such a world. There's a real tragedy going on
here beyond just people losing their jobs, Like the whole
world is getting less informed, and it's likely to get
worse before it gets better, if it gets better. Now,
While I would argue that pivot to video was a
(36:56):
true disaster, I think it's also safe to say that
it really just sped up a trend that was already
in motion. So I don't want to suggest that pivot
to video doomed online content all by itself. Because content
platforms were already seeing declines in traffic before the pivot
to video issue, SEO was really starting to lose it shine.
(37:17):
Social platforms were taking up more of the general public's time,
meaning that you really did need to consider how to
create content that could do well on sites like Facebook
and Twitter and et cetera. So revenues were already going down,
and some sites were, like I said, experimenting with paywalls
and asking readers to subscribe and pay a recurring fee
in return to access the content on the site. But
(37:40):
very few sites can actually do that and see much success.
A few can, but not most there weren't a lot
of opportunities out there to improve outlooks on revenue. And meanwhile,
companies still need to make money. Companies exist in order
to make money. Publicly traded companies need to do even
more than that. They can't just make money, they need
(38:01):
to grow and make more money than they did, say
the year before. So I think things were already looking
pretty grim for online content even before the pivot to video.
It's just pivot to video press that accelerator all the
way down, like it was pedal to the metal on
pivot to video. Anyway, to this day, people still use
(38:23):
pivot to video as kind of shorthand in a cynical
way to say that a company is making a drastic
and ultimately harmful decision, typically in an effort to get
some short term relief from market pressures, but with long
term negative consequences. Sometimes you just use it to describe
a really bad decision, like, oh, it's a pivot to video,
(38:43):
and you've still got companies that are emphasizing video. You know.
Meta's Instagram is a great example. The company embraced short
form video reels in other words, on Instagram, and they
did this primarily as a way to try and compete
with TikTok. Now reels make up a prey significant portion
of Instagram content, something that you know, a lot of
people object to like. Even the Kardashians are not crazy
(39:05):
about this. Meanwhile, over at X formerly known as Twitter,
the Muskie one has said that the X Twitter is
now a video first platform. Of course, Elon Musk is
also trying to wrestle with a very real problem because
Twitter has seen most of its high value advertisers jump ship,
mostly due to Elon Musk and his refusal to curb
(39:28):
any of the awful stuff going on over at X,
including his own participation in elevating tweets that have hate
speech and misinformation in them. The whole pivot to video
story still makes me angry and sad. A lot of
folks lost their jobs as a result of all that nonsense.
We all suffer due to a decline in good, reliable content. Meanwhile,
(39:50):
I ended up pivoting to audio. I mean, you know,
I've been podcasting since two thousand and eight, but I
was still writing articles up until around twenty eighteen or so,
and then I shifted over to focus exclusively on researching, writing,
and recording shows like this one. But anyway, that kind
of wraps up our story so far. With pivot to video,
it's the story that's ongoing. I mean, the real focus
(40:14):
of it, I think would be between twenty fifteen and
twenty eighteen, but we're still seeing, like I said, this
intentional push toward video content, even podcasts. Right, A lot
of podcasts now exist as YouTube videos as well. I
haven't done that personally because I guess I could publish
episodes to YouTube just so folks could find tech stuff
(40:37):
on YouTube, but I would probably just pair it with
a static image because otherwise all you're going to see
is a video of me by myself, sitting at my
desk talking about tech, and I don't know that that
is interesting enough to merit publication. If I had a
co host or something, it would be a different story.
But with it just being me, I'm not entirely convinced
that it's for the best. I guess you can argue
(41:00):
with me if you like, and if enough people say, hey,
please get these up on YouTube, I'll see what I
can do. But anyway, that's the pivot to video story
so far. I hope you found this interesting and I
will talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is
(41:21):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Heydarren, Welcome
to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an
executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? Friends?
Let me tell you a story. It's a sad story,
(00:26):
and for folks like me, it's also a scary story.
Anyone who was in online writing or online journalism found
it to be a scary story. It's also a tale
that gets us angry because at the heart of it
were lies, or at least mistakes that a platform told
to advertisers in an effort to get more money. But
(00:49):
those lies or mistakes helped justify some really harmful decisions
across multiple companies. So we're talking about the infamous pivot
to video. Now, to understand pivot to video, we actually
need to set the stage a little bit. So first up,
let's talk about the business of online content. For most outlets,
(01:12):
revenue comes from advertising. The online platform sets aside certain
landscape upon which advertisers can place clients' ads, and these
may be static or dynamic, meaning if it's static, you're
going to see the same ad every single time you
go to that piece of content. If it's dynamic, then
it could change out right, and it'll change out depending
(01:34):
upon an algorithm that's trying to make sure that each
ad that's been sold is getting the number of eyeballs
that were promised. The whole business of online advertising gets
really complicated, and I've covered it elsewhere, so we're not
going to dive into it too much. Just know that
online ads were the big, big revenue source. You know,
some platforms experimented with paywalls and subscriptions, but very few
(01:58):
of those worked. All touch on that again later. Now. Ideally,
the people who are actually behind making the content, you know,
the writers and the editors, they don't need to be
concerned with any of that. That's not their job. They
go on writing and editing. The journalists do their investigative work,
and they identify leads, and they follow up with those leads,
(02:19):
and they check sources, and generally they do the very
hard work the journalists do in order to get the
truth out to the public. Folks who are like me,
whom I would classify myself as a writer, not a journalist.
I didn't have it nearly as tough as journalists do.
Like I don't want to give anyone any feelings that
somehow my job was as tough as being an investigative journalist.
(02:42):
It certainly wasn't. But you know, we also have to
do things like we have to research, and we have
to check sources, and we have to make reasonably sure
that the stuff that we're writing is accurate. You know,
our reputations are on the line, and our jobs are
often on the line. But I would say the lift
is lighter to journalists, at least in my opinion, in
my experience, based upon what I know now, good writers
(03:05):
should command a decent salary, and good journalists definitely should
command a good salary. They possess talents and skills that
aren't necessarily universal. It's not like you could just fire
somebody and hire some random person off the street and
get the same result. Right, to be a good journalist
or a good writer requires a lot of dedication. It
(03:26):
requires skill and talent and practice, and without these things,
the quality of the overall site would become garbage. Now,
it wouldn't necessarily be worth advertising on either, right, Like,
if the quality of the site goes down and that
means fewer people go to it, then advertisers don't want
to put ads on that site. It doesn't make sense
(03:47):
that those ads aren't going to be seen, so why bother. However,
we all know that sometimes garbage can have an appeal
of its own that will continue to draw visitors. Just
because something is low in quality doesn't mean it's unpoppulsler.
And also just because something is high quality doesn't mean
that it's sought after. This is just the nature of
(04:07):
our world. So sometimes you can create garbage and do
really well if it's garbage that people are interested in. Anyway,
running a content site that's staffed by like salaried writers
and editors gets to be really expensive because that's a
lot of salaries, and the work can be slow, particularly
for those who are working on in depth pieces in
(04:30):
which journalists are you know, having to follow up on
all those pesky leads and loose ends. That kind of
thing takes time, and that might mean that you could
be waiting a while for the next piece to be
ready for publication. You're not churning out content, you're not
a content farm. Meanwhile, you still have to keep paying
this yutz who's working on this really in depth piece
(04:52):
for all their work. It ain't hardly fair right, because
you know they're still haven't actually published the thing. That's
my guess as to how certain online content platform owners
think that you know, it ain't hardly fair that we
have to pay them even though they haven't published their
article yet. Of course, maybe you can cut back on
the costs by going with freelance writers, you know, because
(05:13):
you only pay freelance writers when they turn in a
finished piece. You'll still need an editorial staff, likely a
salaried editorial staff, but you don't need to hold on
to a staff of salaried writers if you're just dependent
upon freelancers. Now you might find it challenging to reach
a consistent level of quality. But there are some very good,
very accomplished freelancers out there who are just as good
(05:35):
as any salaried writer, or even better in some cases.
So hopefully you can attract some of those to write
for you. If not, well, you can hope that the
folks you do get are good enough, or that your
editorial staff can maybe hush things up if the articles
are perhaps a little below standard. But at any rate,
you can bring down some of the costs that way
(05:57):
by not having salaried writing staff. Meanwhile, the other thing
that you're concerned with, or perhaps obsessed with, is SEO,
which stands for Search engine optimization. So why would you
be obsessed with SEO. Well, for years, the primary source
of traffic for many websites, not all of them, but
many of them would be search engines. So of course
(06:20):
when I say search engines, I really mean Google. Yes,
there are other search engines out there. Some people exclusively
use other search engines, but Google is by far the
dominant search engine on the web. So ranking high in
Google search engines is really important because if you're below
say the first several results, or worse yet, if you
(06:42):
show up after page one, you're just not going to
get very much traffic from those search engines. Folks tend
to follow the top links that are listed. Most will
not go beyond the first page, and quite a few
won't go quote unquote below the fold, which means they'll
click on something they can see upon getting their search
(07:02):
results without having to scroll down the page at all.
So part of your strategy is to identify stuff that
people are searching for and then to create content that
meets those needs. Or better yet, you figure out what
folks are going to be searching for tomorrow and then
you get the jump on everyone else. So you hire
some SEO consultants to help you optimize your site. Maybe
(07:26):
you're throwing in a bunch of meta data and such
to give you the best chance to rank high on
Google's search results. And you either don't think about or
you push aside the concern that should Google adjust its
approach to search results, you'll be back at square one,
because that's a thing. Google changes its algorithm every so often.
(07:46):
Those changes could mean that you go from having a
healthy flow of visitors because you rank really high on
the list, or you go down to a trickle because
suddenly there's a change in the algorithm and now you're
not appearing on page one anymore. And that's really scary, right.
You could be spending tons of money to rank high
(08:07):
on lists, only for Google to change things and you're
worse off than you were before. Of course, your ideal
situation is to convince folks to come to your site
all on their own, just to go straight to your site,
not to get there via search engine, and that means
you have to create a site that is a destination
in itself. So instead of going to Google and searching
(08:29):
for some random topic and just so happens that you
have covered that topic on your site and people come
to you that way. These people are coming straight to
your page just to see what you've posted and maybe
see if there's something interesting that they want to look at.
Maybe even scroll around and look through archives to see
if there's old stuff that they want to read. That
is the dream to create a site that is so
(08:51):
inviting and so interesting that people go to it just
on their own, but for an awful lot of sites
out there, it remains a dream. Only a small percentage
of your visitors may be coming to your site just
to see what you've posted. Most are likely finding you
by following a link from a search results page. Another
thing that was changing at this time was online video.
(09:13):
So YouTube had launched back in two thousand and five,
and it wasn't the first online video platform, but obviously
it's the one that has become the most famous, and
it was in twenty eleven when things really started to
change quite a bit with online video. So twenty eleven
is the year when YouTube acquired a company that was
called Next New Networks. One of the folks who co
(09:36):
founded that company, Jed Simmons envisioned a new kind of
business on YouTube that he called a multi channel network.
This wasn't so much as new as it was newly defined.
So a multi channel network describes a company that owns
and operates multiple channels on YouTube. The company is in
charge of programming and content, meaning it's not just an
(09:56):
organization that aggregates existing channels that each operate more or
less independently of one another. So this is kind of
similar to how cable television works. For example, back in
the day, Discovery Incorporated, which is now part of Warner Brothers.
Discovery owned and operated cable channels like Discovery, the Science Channel, TLC,
the Food Network, Animal Planet, and you know, like around
(10:19):
a dozen more channels. So on top of the multi
channel network strategy, YouTube pushed for content creators to do
their thing over on YouTube itself, to adopt YouTube as
a home base, and the company set aside a cool
one hundred million bucks to help new original channels get
off the ground. These included original channels like Geek and Sundry,
(10:40):
The Onion, and THENOC. The initiative would last about a
year and a half or so, at which point YouTube
quietly removed all references to this initiative and had reportedly
cut funding for more than half of the launched channels
because they just weren't performing to the level that was
needed in order to recoup the cost of investment. So
we see the dangers in relying upon a third party
(11:02):
when it comes to making content, because if that third
party suddenly decides to change something, suddenly you don't have
a home anymore. Then in the mid twenty tens, things
were really changing quite a bit. Search results were starting
to matter less, which wasn't necessarily a good thing for
those content platforms that depended upon traffic from Google, and instead,
(11:23):
social networks were beginning to matter more. People were saying, oh, well,
they go to their social networks and that's where they
get their news. They'll see something posted on Facebook, for example,
or Twitter, and then they'll follow up on it there
rather than going to a search engine or to a
content site directly. So friends would click on links and
(11:44):
content would go viral through people sharing on places like
Facebook or Twitter, and this meant that SEO would become
less important, and now content providers had to figure out
how could they create the kinds of content that would
do well on social media, which is a totally different skill,
Like you have to think in a different way for
something to do well on a social platform versus to
(12:08):
rank well in search. The writers and editors who just
wanted to do you a good job, they just wanted
to do work and to make a living off of
doing work, they would get jerked around quite a bit.
The types of content and the style of writing would change,
sometimes drastically, in an effort to cater to what does
(12:28):
well on social networks. This is where we started to
see the real embrace of lists and listicles, because lists
tend to do pretty well on social network or at
least they did at the time, and it was the worst.
Like if you were someone who was really dedicated to writing,
getting an assignment to write a list could be really depressing.
(12:50):
I mean, there were people who did amazing jobs at it.
I know writers who did fantastic jobs at creating lists,
but from my perspective, my experience, it was just far
less satisfying to have to do a list as opposed
to a quote unquote normal article. Some sites really excelled
at getting traction on social networks, like BuzzFeed was pretty
(13:11):
darn good at it. And others rarely saw very much success.
Like you would try, like you seem to be doing
what everyone else was doing, but you just weren't necessarily
getting much traction. And so by twenty fifteen, content sites
were starting to put most of their eggs in the
social network basket. And I'm reminded of a conversation I
once had with Bernie Burns, one of the founders of
(13:32):
the media company Rooster Teeth. So Bernie told me that
he felt a key component to success on the Internet
if you're a content company is that you always maintain
your own platform, and you can show up on other platforms, right.
You can show up on YouTube, you can show up
on Facebook, but you always need to maintain your own
home and never fully commit to someone else's site as
(13:56):
being your base of operations, because if that other entity
does change things, you're up the creek. Kind of like
how content sites had optimized for one Google search algorithm
and then had to scramble and Google changed things up,
Or like how those original channels on YouTube had to
shut down once YouTube pulled the plug on the experiment. Now,
(14:16):
on the one hand, maybe those channels never would have
had a shot without YouTube's help in the first place,
so you could argue that they really didn't lose much
because they never would have had the opportunity without it anyway.
But on the other hand, once the third party shuts
off the support, the media company more often than not
had to fold. Okay, we're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, i'll talk more about the dreaded
(14:38):
pivot to video, but first a word from our sponsors. Okay,
we're back, and we've got a bunch of content sites
out there that are hanging on social networks to a
dangerous degree. The revenue models are such that the owners
(15:00):
of these sites are always looking for ways to reduce costs.
And then we finally get to the disastrous pivot to
video moment. And a few things would feed into this.
One is the perception that video is more nimble than
having to depend on written content. You can be more
fast and loose with video than you can with articles.
(15:23):
You can write and shoot a whole bunch of episodes
in a day, you can bank a bunch of content,
or more likely, you can release the content at a
regular pace, only to do it all again the next day.
And starting from scratch and making video is tough. You
could have a very small team doing it, but you know,
hats off to everyone on that team. I have worked
(15:44):
in this space a bit, and I can tell you that,
in my opinion, the talent on screen, the person you're
seeing in the video, typically has the easiest job, particularly
if they're not the one who had to write the
copy in the first place, like some people who appear
on the video. They're the ones who did all the
research and and that's a ton of work, but not
all the time. So back when I worked at houstuffworks
(16:05):
dot com, I would occasionally get pulled in to shoot
videos that were written by other people because we were
just as much affected by this pivot to video as
a lot of other sites. So a great example of
this is one of the most popular videos that featured yours. Truly,
I've been in some videos that went pretty viral, but
I think this one might be one of the top ones.
(16:25):
And it's a video that's titled why do People in
Old Movies Talk Weird? It's still up on YouTube if
you want to check it out. It has more than
five million views, which isn't too shabby. Now, obviously, that's
nowhere close to being even remotely one of the more
popular videos on the platform. Right, five million is big
for me, it's not big for like the truly huge
(16:48):
creators out there anyway. Ben Bolin, my arch nemesis, actually
wrote that episode. I did not. I threw in an
improvised line at the very end of the video about
Rigi races, but that was about it anyway. All I
really had to do was I had to show up,
and I had to read my lines off of a teleprompter.
And I'm pretty good at that. I'm pretty good at
(17:10):
reading off a teleprompter, and I can do it well
enough where it can come across naturally, like it doesn't
necessarily sound like I'm reading off a teleprompter, and I
can typically get through a video in just one or
sometimes two takes. They called me one take Strickland back
in the day, but for everyone else who was working
on that team, it was a lot more work. Like again,
(17:31):
I had the easiest job, but you got the writer Ben.
In this case, Ben had to research and write the
piece and then cut it down so that it could
fit a particular format. It didn't need to go too long,
but it needed to be informative enough to justify its existence.
You've got the tech crew. They have to make sure
that the sound and the video and the lights and
all of that are working properly, and that I look
(17:53):
as good as I possibly can on a camera. There's
only so much you can do, but you get the idea.
And then you've got the poor editor whose job is
to take all this footage and then combine it with
you know, other stuff like stock footage, and to get
it ready for publication. So my heart really goes out
to the editors. They often were be absolutely slammed with work.
You know, as soon as they finished one piece they
had to jump on another one. I don't know how
(18:14):
they did it and kept their sanity. Anyway, with a
relatively small team, you could churn out a whole lot
of content. Now let's get back to another big component,
the perception that video brings in more ad revenue. I
think you could reasonably argue this perception is what led
to a whole lot of great writers and editors losing
their jobs. And it all starts with a lie, or
(18:37):
at the very least, a huge mistake. So the year
is twenty fifteen, and here in the United States we
were heading into an election year. It seems like we're
always doing that, but you know, twenty fifteen, we're getting
ready for the twenty sixteen election year. That was a
year that promised to be a real doozy, and it
sure as heck was. And there was obviously a glut
(18:58):
of content coming in from new use pieces, to opinion pieces,
to misinformation campaigns, to all the types of stuff that
folks produce whether it's an election year or not. And
Mark Zuckerberg was going around evangelizing the future was video,
So he was making the rounds kind of lack a
Bible thump and travel and revival. Sorry that's my rural
(19:20):
Georgian coming out of me. Anyway. He was telling various
organizations that, based on Facebook's research, online video was where
it was at. Engagement with your plain old text and
image content was on the decline. Reach was diminishing for
these content companies, but video was a different story. So,
according to Facebook's analysis, users were far more likely to
(19:42):
watch and engage with video than other types of content
while on Facebook. In fact, they were likely to pause
a video so that they could watch the whole thing
rather than just nope out of it. If you know,
something came up like, you know, if they got a
notification or something. This was music to advertisers' ears. After all,
advertisers spend an awful lot of money to get their
(20:05):
ads placed so that users can potentially see them, but
the advertisers never get any assurance that the user will
you know, actually see the ads or pay attention to them.
So a lot of us have developed ad blindness over
the years. And then quite a few folks have ad
blockers installed on their browsers so that they don't have
to even develop ad blindness because the app does it
(20:28):
for them. But if people are watching videos, well that's
potentially a great place to put ads. And according to Facebook,
you know, people were watching an awful lot of videos,
that this was the way of the future, that soon
the majority of content on Facebook would be in video format. Meanwhile,
content companies started to say, oh, that's where all the
(20:49):
money's going to go. That's where all the advertising money
is going to go, is to video, because advertisers are
being told this is what is the important content. So
if we want to get adverts tizing money, which is
the source of our revenue, we need to make sure
that we're in the business of creating video, which also
means we can downsize our editorial department and instead of
having this big editorial staff with editors and writers, we
(21:12):
can have a small video team that generates just a
ton of videos. We'll reduce costs and will generate more revenue.
So that seems like an ideal situation. And then we
started to see layoffs across the web in various editorial departments.
I mean it was brutal. You know, company after company
was laying off writers and editors. It was just a
(21:34):
terrible thing to see. The message seemed to be that
search engine traffic was a dying source of visitors and
that social networks were in fact the future and you
had to get on that train. And further that you
really wanted to host stuff on those social networks natively
in order to get the most out of it. So
the perception was if you hosted a video on your
(21:55):
own site. So let's say it's house stuff Works. Let's
say we post a video to how stuff works done,
and then we link to that video on housetuffworks dot
com through a Facebook page. Right, we have the house
Stuffworks Facebook page. Well, the perception was you would not
get very much help from Facebook, you wouldn't get much
promotion and so not that many people would see it,
(22:16):
which means it wouldn't get a lot of engagement, which
means it wouldn't go viral. But if instead you created
that page on Facebook, so you have your house, stuffworks
page on Facebook, and then you started to upload videos
directly into Facebook itself, so that all the traffic is
going to the Facebook version of the video, not the
one that's hosted on your home site, well then the
(22:38):
all powerful Facebook algorithm would make sure that your video's
got a wider distribution so that there was a better
chance then more folks would see it and that it
could potentially go viral. Not a guarantee, but a better
chance than if you were just posting a link. So
the message was you've got to shift a video and
you've got to host your stuff on the social networks
(22:59):
them selves. You know, two things that ended up not
being the best advice. And there was a real problem
with all of this. It's that the information that the
advertisers got was was based on a lie, or at
the very least it was based on a mistake. Now
I can't say for sure that the folks in Facebook
were knowingly promoting an untruth to advertisers and content creators.
(23:24):
Facebook denies that that was ever the case. They said
that at the time they made a mistake and they
misstated the engagement levels with video, and that it was
all just based on an innocent mistake. It wasn't an
intentional thing at all. But you know, you could just
argue someone forgot to carry the one or something. But anyway,
(23:44):
according to various sources, Facebook exaggerated the engagement statistics to
a significant degree, Like sixty to eighty percent is what
was the initially believed. Later on there were arguments that
that was closer to between one hundred and fifty to
nine hundred percent. I don't know what the actual the
actual figure is, but let's just say that what Facebook
(24:08):
was telling advertisers back in twenty fifteen was absolutely not true.
And the truth was that video wasn't doing that great
on Facebook. It's not like it was, you know, the
worst thing ever, but it wasn't going like gangbusters the
way Facebook had implied. And apparently when Facebook was factoring
(24:28):
how much people were watching video, the problem was they
were counting videos that were on auto play. That when
people were just scrolling through their feed. If a video
came up as they were scrolling, the video automatically started playing,
and if it played for three seconds or longer, then
it counted toward engagement. If it didn't play for three seconds,
(24:49):
then it wasn't counted. It didn't it wasn't counted against it,
It wasn't counted at all. So it was like cherry
picking and cherry picking incidents that may not indicate that
anyone's watching video at all. Let's say that I'm scrolling
down and I scrolled down and then there's a friend
of mine has posted something some in text, and I'm
just reading the text. Meanwhile below that post is a
(25:10):
little video that's on auto play, and it's going as
I'm reading the text and not paying any attention at
all to the video. Well, Facebook was counting that as
if I were intently watching the video, which means that
advertisers being told that all these people are watching tons
of video on Facebook, when in fact, no, it's just
that tons of video was playing on Facebook. Whether people
(25:31):
were watching it or not was a totally different matter.
But the problem was you had all these advertisers who
were shifting their ad revenue budgets to support video content.
And then that meant that you had all these media
companies and content creators completely uprooting their business model, totally
decimating their editorial departments in order to go where the
(25:53):
money was, right, Like, it doesn't make sense to keep
writing great content if you're not going to get any
ads placed against it, because you're not going to make
any money, and ultimately you'll go out of business, Like
there's no there's no grant or anything that's going to
keep you going just because you happen to be writing
great content. So you have to move to where the
(26:15):
money is. The money was in video. So everyone was
suffering for this, right You had people who were losing
their jobs because they were writers or editors. You had
the media companies that were suffering because it turned out
that these videos weren't going crazy viral the way Facebook
was suggesting. The advertisers were losing because people weren't actually
(26:36):
watching the ads the way that they thought was going
to happen. Facebook was losing because when people found out
about this, it did not look good for the company.
Like nobody nobody came out great for this. So even
the video teams, which were had steady employment right, Like,
they didn't have to worry about hitting unemployment the way
the writers and editors were. They were hurt too because
(27:00):
they were frequently working in a constant crunch that just
demanded that they immediately moved to the next video as
soon as they finished the previous one. And I've been
in a similar situation, I can tell you it is
exhausting and it is demoralizing. In fact, some folks that
I really respect actually left the field around this time
because of these issues. They were like, that's it. I'm
going to go find a job in a totally different
(27:22):
field because this is killing me. Now. The world would
find out that Facebook had at the very least done
goofed up a couple of years after they were really
pushing for this, like in late twenty sixteen, really, but
in twenty fifteen. In most of twenty sixteen, things were
shifting massively toward video. Once the smoke cleared and the
(27:42):
ad world discovered that they had been sold a business
model based on an incorrect analysis, the lawsuits poured in
and they cited internal Facebook documents that had been leaked.
These internal documents implied folks within the company had figured
out that there was this mistake, that it did appear
to be a miss it wasn't like an intentional lie,
(28:03):
but that the mistake had been discovered, and then the
decision had been made to cover that up, to hide
it from the public, to not admit to this mistake,
which is arguably as bad as just an outright lie
in the first place. And Facebook executives claim that no
one on their side deliberately misled any of the ad companies,
(28:23):
which I find challenging to believe, but maybe it's true. However,
in twenty nineteen, Facebook agreed to a settlement with these
advertising companies without actually admitting fault. By that time, even
more shenanigans were causing problems. I'll explain what I mean
by that, but first we're going to take another quick
break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back, and yes,
(28:55):
it gets worse. So the online content world is an upheaval.
Not every online platform completely throws in with the pivot
to video strategy, but a lot of them did, and
the phrase pivot to video began to kind of become
gallows humor. It was a euphemism for stuff like layoffs
(29:15):
and a decline in content quality over time, it was
pretty grim stuff Like if you said pivot to video,
you're kind of saying, yeah, the quality of that site
has really gone downhill over the last few years. That
management has made some very short sighted decisions based on
bad information. That's kind of what it became over time.
(29:37):
But what made this even worse was once again Facebook.
So here you have this platform which claims for a
couple of years that the future is all video, and
that within a few years practically every post on Facebook
will be video in some way, which prompts, obviously everyone
to rush toward adopting the video format. Then came the
(30:00):
concept of meaningful Social interactions or MSI, which sounds like
a Law and Order spin off, doesn't it. But meaningful
social interactions referred to an attempt to emphasize interactions between
a user and that user's friends and family, which on
the surface level you can kind of understand, right because
(30:23):
early Facebook people, a lot of people are like, man,
I really miss what Facebook used to be, where you
would log in and you would see, essentially in reverse
chronological order, the posts that your friends had made on
the platform, so at the top of the most recent
posts and you would scroll down, and you would keep
scrolling till you started to see stuff that you had
seen before, and you're like, okay, I'm all caught up.
(30:44):
And it was just your friends, and it was everything
they posted right, like, you weren't missing out on stuff.
It wasn't like Facebook was deciding which of your friend's
posts you would see and which ones you wouldn't see.
But eventually Facebook adopted algorithms that very much determined what
you would see. And it wasn't always from your friends
and family. It was often from lots of times advertisers
(31:09):
or stuff that Facebook algorithm assumed you would be interested
in in an effort to keep you engaged, to keep
you on the platform for as long as was possible.
So part of the issue was that Facebook determined, after
a couple of years of experimenting with this, that you know,
people aren't super crazy about just seeing random stuff created
(31:32):
by you know, like professional content media companies or whatever.
They really want to see what their friends and family
are up to. This feels like it was the most
obvious information that was out there, and yet Facebook's like, hey,
this is what we've discovered. So the idea of Facebook
had was that people would stay on Facebook longer if
they saw that the content on their feeds related to
(31:54):
the people who are actually in their lives. Go figure again,
seems like a pretty obvious thing to me. So you're
more likely to see a post from your uncle ted
pop up than just from some random video from some
random media company because Facebook now wanted to emphasize these
meaningful social interactions. But the shift to MSI meant that
(32:17):
Facebook was purposefully moving away from promoting videos from these
media companies, you know, the same media companies that Facebook
had convinced to shift to video just a couple of
years earlier, and to post those videos directly into Facebook itself. Essentially,
Facebook had convinced an entire industry to change how it
(32:40):
did business, and now Facebook was saying, yeah, we're not
going to promote your stuff anymore, Like we're going to
make sure algorithm isn't like emphasizing your content because it
turns out that's not what people want. It's what we
said people wanted, it's what we convinced advertisers that people wanted,
but it turns out no, it's not actually what people wanted.
(33:00):
So uh yeah, we're sorry, but uh yeah, we're not
gonna We're not gonna help you all out anymore. So
now you have these media companies with their stripped down staff,
this small skeleton crew that's killing themselves to publish multiple
videos a day to a Facebook page, and then Facebook
itself is limiting the reach of the videos that this
(33:22):
team is creating. The value proposition these companies were built
on just withered away. Content could still see widespread distribution
like that could still happen, but only if it was
driving a lot of engagement early on. And the stuff
that typically drove tons of engagement was the more extreme
stuff like not your typical news videos or whatever it was,
(33:45):
videos that got people angry. Those did really well because
people would engage with them. And you know, videos that
would pit one group against another, those did pretty well too. Essentially,
the videos that played to the worst of our tendencies
were the one ones that were most likely to go
viral and drive engagement. Now this meant that the content
companies got the message of if you want your videos
(34:08):
to do well, you got to rile people up. There
was even less of a place for valuable journalism or
creative videos. You might come up with something charming and
entertaining and informative, but it was far less likely to
get as many views as something that was controversial, mean spirited,
and you know, maybe even a lie. So you didn't
(34:28):
have to bother making sure that anything you claimed was
true or accurate. That was way less important than just
grabbing attention. So these ugly videos started to get a
lot of engagement, and that just meant that more folks
would see them and then interact with them, and that
meant that even more folks would see them and interact
with them, and so on. So it became this vicious
cycle that rewarded some of the worst content at the
(34:49):
expense of everything else. Now, I often argue that we
can't just jump to the conclusion that Facebook is actively
harming mental health. That is often a claim, and I say,
we can't jump to that conclusion. But I do think
you can make a decent argument that Facebook's policies and
algorithms facilitate the spread of content that is detrimental to
(35:10):
mental health. So maybe I'm being too kind. I think
the problem is a pretty complicated one. Anyway, The whole
shift to MSI was like a rug pull on these
media companies, and it again reinforced the advice that Bernie
Burns had years earlier that depending upon a third party
for stability is an inherently dangerous proposition because whenever that
(35:32):
third party makes a change in how it operates, it
can drastically affect your ability to do business. Such was
the way of Facebook. The nasty consequences of all this
is that even more folks got laid off because Facebook
changed tactics again, and now media companies were seeing that
their reach had been greatly diminished, so they didn't generate
(35:53):
as much revenue, which meant they needed to lay people
off as a result. So if you've wondered why online
content from certain media companies just doesn't feel the same
as it used to, this is one of the reasons.
Now another reason involves experimentations with AI, because companies like
c net and even my former employer, HowStuffWorks dot Com
(36:13):
have occasionally relied on AI to generate content, and that
can be really disheartening, particularly if you consider how it
declined in journalism and writing means that we have less
reliable and insightful information at our fingertips. This means we
become less equipped to understand the world around us and
(36:34):
what's going on and how perhaps we should comport ourselves
in such a world. There's a real tragedy going on
here beyond just people losing their jobs, Like the whole
world is getting less informed, and it's likely to get
worse before it gets better, if it gets better. Now,
While I would argue that pivot to video was a
(36:56):
true disaster, I think it's also safe to say that
it really just sped up a trend that was already
in motion. So I don't want to suggest that pivot
to video doomed online content all by itself. Because content
platforms were already seeing declines in traffic before the pivot
to video issue, SEO was really starting to lose it shine.
(37:17):
Social platforms were taking up more of the general public's time,
meaning that you really did need to consider how to
create content that could do well on sites like Facebook
and Twitter and et cetera. So revenues were already going down,
and some sites were, like I said, experimenting with paywalls
and asking readers to subscribe and pay a recurring fee
in return to access the content on the site. But
(37:40):
very few sites can actually do that and see much success.
A few can, but not most there weren't a lot
of opportunities out there to improve outlooks on revenue. And meanwhile,
companies still need to make money. Companies exist in order
to make money. Publicly traded companies need to do even
more than that. They can't just make money, they need
(38:01):
to grow and make more money than they did, say
the year before. So I think things were already looking
pretty grim for online content even before the pivot to video.
It's just pivot to video press that accelerator all the
way down, like it was pedal to the metal on
pivot to video. Anyway, to this day, people still use
(38:23):
pivot to video as kind of shorthand in a cynical
way to say that a company is making a drastic
and ultimately harmful decision, typically in an effort to get
some short term relief from market pressures, but with long
term negative consequences. Sometimes you just use it to describe
a really bad decision, like, oh, it's a pivot to video,
(38:43):
and you've still got companies that are emphasizing video. You know.
Meta's Instagram is a great example. The company embraced short
form video reels in other words, on Instagram, and they
did this primarily as a way to try and compete
with TikTok. Now reels make up a prey significant portion
of Instagram content, something that you know, a lot of
people object to like. Even the Kardashians are not crazy
(39:05):
about this. Meanwhile, over at X formerly known as Twitter,
the Muskie one has said that the X Twitter is
now a video first platform. Of course, Elon Musk is
also trying to wrestle with a very real problem because
Twitter has seen most of its high value advertisers jump ship,
mostly due to Elon Musk and his refusal to curb
(39:28):
any of the awful stuff going on over at X,
including his own participation in elevating tweets that have hate
speech and misinformation in them. The whole pivot to video
story still makes me angry and sad. A lot of
folks lost their jobs as a result of all that nonsense.
We all suffer due to a decline in good, reliable content. Meanwhile,
(39:50):
I ended up pivoting to audio. I mean, you know,
I've been podcasting since two thousand and eight, but I
was still writing articles up until around twenty eighteen or so,
and then I shifted over to focus exclusively on researching, writing,
and recording shows like this one. But anyway, that kind
of wraps up our story so far. With pivot to video,
it's the story that's ongoing. I mean, the real focus
(40:14):
of it, I think would be between twenty fifteen and
twenty eighteen, but we're still seeing, like I said, this
intentional push toward video content, even podcasts. Right, A lot
of podcasts now exist as YouTube videos as well. I
haven't done that personally because I guess I could publish
episodes to YouTube just so folks could find tech stuff
(40:37):
on YouTube, but I would probably just pair it with
a static image because otherwise all you're going to see
is a video of me by myself, sitting at my
desk talking about tech, and I don't know that that
is interesting enough to merit publication. If I had a
co host or something, it would be a different story.
But with it just being me, I'm not entirely convinced
that it's for the best. I guess you can argue
(41:00):
with me if you like, and if enough people say, hey,
please get these up on YouTube, I'll see what I
can do. But anyway, that's the pivot to video story
so far. I hope you found this interesting and I
will talk to you again, really soon. Tech Stuff is
(41:21):
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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