Facebook can be boring. On any given day, you may see baby pictures, cat videos, engagement announcements, photos of a friend’s lavish vacation, a diatribe on bacon, a video from a wedding you weren’t invited to, and asinine arguments about politics.
Because you’ve added “friends” through the years—high school classmates, college housemates, coworkers, family—your feed can fill with meaningless ephemera from people you haven’t spoken to in, well, years.But when you absentmindedly open Facebook on, say, the commute home, you don’t want to be bored. Facebook doesn’t want you to be, either. Its whole business depends on keeping people like you entertained. It wants News Feed to reveal the most important things for people to see on any given day, or in any given moment, tailored to each of its1.49 billion users. Otherwise, you might stop looking—and if people stop looking, Facebook stops making money.
Lately, in an effort to hold your attention, Facebook has turned its own attention beyond being a place to share content to becoming the place where that content lives. For years, you and your friends haven’t just shared thoughts, you’ve also shared links. Now, by building tools for publishers and entertainers, Facebook is looking to bring the content of those links—the videos, photos, and articles—inside its own walls to not only have the most desirable content, but to make it look and feel good too.
After all, how we use the Internet today has fundamentally changed since Facebook started a decade ago. We read, watch, and consume more stuff on the go. Our phones are quickly becoming the main portal, and apps the gatekeepers. To keep users within its walls as media becomes increasingly distributed, Facebook wants to ensure that it has the best content, presented in the easiest, most seamless ways, so you have little incentive to leave.
To that end, Facebook has embraced native video (no need to go to YouTube) and launched Instant Articles (no need to seek news elsewhere). In the case of Instant Articles, Facebook announced last week that everyone using its iPhone app will now see stories,natively hosted on Facebook, from news organizations, ranging from The New York Timesand NBC News to BuzzFeed and MTV.
All of them, it turns out, are ultimately in the same business: capturing your attention. And now the giant social network that has siphoned off so much attention from traditional media is turning to that same industry to help keep it. That shift has caused some anxiety within the media industry itself as it grapples with what it means to lose a more direct connection with its audience.
In a way, Facebook has become a bit like a mix of a broadcast network, a movie studio, and a cable company all in one, partnering with publishers, entertainers, athletes, and other personalities to become the ultimate destination. It’s working with media giants like HBO and CNN along with celebrities and journalists like The Rock and Anderson Cooper. And unlike the engineering culture that drives much of Facebook’s work, this part of Facebook doesn’t thrive on a hacker culture of moving fast and breaking things. Instead, it depends on something far more traditional: good, old-fashioned relationships.
News Matters
When Justin Osofsky joined Facebook in 2008, it was a completely different site. The company had recently opened its digital walls to include more than just college students, but there weren’t yet 100 million users in what he likes to call “the community.”
Now Facebook’s vice president of global operations and media partnerships, Osofsky, like seemingly everyone at Facebook, is on an ostensible mission: to make the world a more open and connected place. To do that, Facebook needs more users; to get them, it needs the content people want to see. So Osofsky was tasked with putting together what he calls a “partner management team” that understood the needs of creators, like, say, The New York Times, NBC, or Disney.
“In the very early days of setting it up, there was a recognition that for News Feed to be interesting we had to work with partners,” Osofsky tells me one recent afternoon at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. “And to work with partners you have to deliver value to them.”
And who better to understand the needs of partners than former employees? Five years ago, Osofsky hired Andy Mitchell, who previously led business and marketing groups at CNN and the Daily Beast and now runs the news division, and Nick Grudin, who was in the midst of helping Newsweek transition to the web before joining Facebook and now leads the partnership team under Osofsky. The team has grown to include dozens, from former journalists to TV producers, who were first in the the news, entertainment, and sports industries.