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Publishers had plenty of warning the Great Facebook News Feed Purge was coming. That doesn’t make the news any less painful for many.
Winners
Giant publishers
Facebook evened the playing field for publishers. It was what enabled overnight traffic sensations like Upworthy, ViralNova and Elite Daily. But for big publishers, losing Facebook audience will be less traumatic, only because the biggest publishers are by nature big everywhere. Their ubiquity when it come to platforms protects them from changes to one.
Publishers with well-established brands independent of Facebook will fare less badly because people will keep sharing those publishers’ content organically, and it’ll get surfaced in people’s feeds that way.
Losers
Facebook’s credibility with publishers
This isn’t the first Facebook rodeo for publishers. For years, they’ve followed Facebook’s lead with its ever-changing platform. When Facebook wanted shares, publishers delivered them, often with cringeworthy tactics collectively known as clickbait. When Facebook wanted live video, publishers ginned up live video. The same happened when it wanted in-feed video. The list goes on.
The Facebook machine is now so big that publishers have lost trust that their point people at Facebook even know what’s truly going on.
