Good morning. It’s Monday, January 15, 2018. We celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today on what would have been his 89th birthday. The King Center’s digital archives have fascinating resources about this great person’s life and legacy.
Facebook says it wants to limit commercial content from organizations and show more personal content. The company thinks that the average time per user will decrease.
But organizations will still pay to reach people via Facebook posts. That will increase competition and ultimately drive ad costs up. That’s a win on all fronts for Facebook.
What We Think
We agree with Facebook. Everyone wants their content to be first on Google, Facebook or anywhere online. But why should it be first? What is it about any organization that causes their content to rise to the top? That predator vs. prey issue is what’s behind the change to Facebook posts so that you see more personal information.
The social media site was in danger of offering unbalanced content–too much from groups, companies, and organizations, and not enough from your friends and family.
These are big changes, but they’ve been made before and slowly rolled back. We think that the end result will be more companies advertising for higher costs. That may not be a bad thing overall. Paid online advertising has been around 20 years. Those of us who do this for a living can easily navigate ad platforms. But there has been only one social media company with more than two billion users, and it can’t afford to be strictly a marketing platform.
Spotlighted
We told you during the holidays that some companies were using Facebook’s ad platform to restrict the age of people viewing employment ads. The AARP and Capitol Hill want Facebook to stop the advertisers’ behavior.. Read more at ProPublica.
Google is temporarily removing ads for rehab and addiction recovery facilities after “shady referral services” were found gaming the system. Read more at TechCrunch.
Snapchat bills itself as a camera company, but The Daily Beast got a look at their usage data and their analysis shows that Snapchat is a chat platform like you always thought. Check out the details with original charts.
Seen any of your friends posting photos of themselves next to great portraits and other art with similar facial features? That’s a fun feature in Google’s Arts & Culture. And it’s the biggest app on the Android platform these days. Here are the links to the Android version. and iOS version.