Facebook’s New Push: “A Personalized Newspaper”
Important Details: Facebook is moving to bring news onto its site. In improvements announced last week, the company moved beyond its battles over “rights and responsibilities,” and announced added features to its product. Saying it now reached 175 million unique users, Facebook’s new face will include:
- Users will find more flexibility in categorizing their Facebook “friends” into subgroups, such as “family,” “close friends” and ”co-workers”;
- Facebook will stream status updates, Twitter-like, onto Facebook pages, trying to beat back the Twitter rush;
- Importantly, in content, Facebook users will be able to share news story links, photos or videos with their comments;
- Its new Marketplace feature aims to make classified advertising part of Facebook’s social experience.
The goal, said Facebook, is a “convergence” of profiles, information pages and commerce, or as Facebook product executive Chris Cox put it, the creation of a “personalized newspaper.”
Meanwhile, in the old newspaper world of convergence, MediaNews has announced a new customized product. Dubbed I-News (for “individuated newspaper”), the product will allow readers to pick the topics that interest them, from a local newspaper company, the AP, and possibly other sources and then have the custom product printed at home and/or sent via the new home printer to digital devices. I-News will require that the reader have a proprietary printer at home; pricing is unannounced, as is who (subscriber or newspaper company) will pay for the printer. MediaNews, the US’s fourth largest newspaper company, will test the product at its LA Daily News this summer.
MediaNews’ goals are to shift printing and delivery costs from the newspaper to the reader (buttressing such experiments as limiting home delivery, as has been announced in Detroit – see Insights 7 January 2009, Dayscrapping Starts to Look Like a 2009 Model) and to accompany the content customization with ad customization and targeting.
The announcement follows the recent launch of NYTimes.com‘s Times Extra, yet another attempt to wed customers to a home page as a base (see Insights 22 January 2009, Times Extra’s Outside-In Approach Aims for Greater Engagement).
Implications: Remember convergence? Recall the battle for the home page? What is old is new again as competitors of every kind try to win the new allegiances of readers and web users.
The reasons are clear. Unique visitor counts and even page view counts have steadily lost value, as “time on site” counts have gained. Time on site equals engagement equals knowledge of audience equals the greater chance to understand and monetize that audience.
Long story short, everyone wants users’ allegiances.
What’s significant here for news companies, long engaged in a losing battle with the search aggregators as first stop and repeat stop on the web, is that a new competitor is clearly emerging: Facebook.
What started as a college-based social site is now a worldwide social network phenomenon. With a monthly time on site exceeding local newspaper’s five to 15 minutes, Facebook already draws a certain kind of allegiance, with a warm, comfortable “place of my own” sensibility. Facebook’s next move is to bring the world into this comfy environment, and that means making it easier to read the news there, or at least see the headlines and then link off.
Facebook’s move is both a move for growth and an attempt to find real monetization. It appears that with all the traffic Facebook has garnered, it can only command, on average, 20-cent CPMs, far below big web and news brands. It has generated lots of use, but has been unable to sufficiently target advertising and to get beyond remnant pricing.
For news publishers, the Facebook move is another reminder that it’s an inside/out, outside/in world. Try as they might to become the portals of the 21st century, much as they were for most of the 20th, that’s been a losing battle. There have been many failed attempts to become that portal, and Outsell believes that i-News, at first blush, will unfortunately join that list, requiring proprietary technology and apparently limiting consumer content choice.
Rather, what’s necessary is an understanding of how to play in this diverse world, in which people hang out all kinds of unforeseen places. The goal is to provide the news — and the advertising — in these hangouts, familiar and strange.