8 Brazilian publisher rethinks NEWSROOMS NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2013 These days, just about every news publishing house seems to be on Facebook. Some are more active than others, but they are almost all there. Bar one, that is: Brazil’s Globo.com. In late 2012, the largest media group in Latin America began reconsidering its Facebook presence – and ended up pulling the plug. “Facebook is not this walk in the park we thought it was a few years ago; it is at the centre of a new advertising model,” said Mariana Correa Esteves, Product Development Manager for Globo.com, during a presentation at this year’s International Newsroom Summit in Berlin. Correa Esteves and her colleague, Leandro Gejfinbein, Head of Market Intelligence and Analytics at the site, explained how in late 2012, their company undertook a study of how Facebook was affecting it on a business level. The results ultimately persuaded it to stop using the social media platform. The move is reminscent of the Guardian’s elimination of its Facebook social reading app last December. Like the Guardian, Globo.com also continues to allow readers to share or recommend content through the use of a Facebook button connected to individual stories on the Globo.com no longer promotes any of its content on Facebook pages. Founded in 2000, Globo.com is a portal and Internet service provider owned by Brazil’s Organizações Globo. Globo.com provides online access to content from the parent company’s newspapers, magazines, broadcast television and radio. “We develop digital products and platforms, and lead web strategy for the rest of the group,” said Correa Esteves. Globo.com has a monthly average of 50 million unique visitors, 4 billion page views and 400 million video views. Until earlier this year, Facebook was a part of its social media distribution strategy via a mix of organic distribution (apps, social reader, share, likes, etc.) and editorial distribution (it used the Facebook page model). In Brazil, as in most countries, Facebook has seen enormous growth. In a recent two-year period, Correa Esteves said the number of Facebook users in the country increased by 250 percent. Worldwide, it currently has more than 1 billion unique users. Global revenue for the social media giant in 2012 was US$5 billion, representing a 34 percent year-on-year increase. So, why stop? This popularity, however, also means that “Facebook is changing the way people consume content on the Internet,” said Correa Esteves. One major way this is happening is through Facebook’s popular News Feed feature, which Gejfinbein pointed out offers a continuous flow of information driven by the “scan reading” habit. “Facebook News Feed creates a perception that all news is there. It slowly changes where people go to get the news: from websites to Facebook,” said Gejfinbein. Also, through its extensive use of algorithms, Facebook selects what users see and don’t see, and different people will have very different experiences using the site, Correa Esteves said. At one time, Facebook called its algorithm tool Edge- Rank, although according to recent reports, that term is no longer used inside Facebook. No new name has been announced for the algorithm tools that today weigh some 100,000 factors in determining exactly what News Feed information each user sees when he or she logs onto Facebook. “If your visits are coming mostly from Facebook News Feed, your business can be dependent on variables that only Facebook controls,” Gejfinbein said. Facebook as content curator and distributor Correa Esteves noted that Facebook has taken control of two of the three main functions that have historically been controlled by traditional media: content curation and distribution. What is left is content creation, which is expensive and time-consuming. News Feed has editorial control, Gejfinbein said. The rules change often, and nobody knows the criteria in detail. In fact, there’s no direct one-to-one control. Interestingly, in late October, the Pew Research Center together with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation released a study based on an online survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults, and found that for the majority of users, finding news on Facebook is incidental. They do find news there, of course, but it tends to be a relatively low priority when using Facebook. Writing about the study on the PaidContent website, Mathew Ingram noted: “In other words, finding news on the giant social network is more of an accident than it is a deliberate event, and that complicates how news outlets handle what they do there. It’s not enough to just have a page, or a social-reading app, like the ones the Washington Post and Guardian spent a lot of time developing – if anything, it reinforces the idea that news content has to be designed and implemented to be as shareable as possible, or hardly anyone is going to see it.” As for Globo.com, leaving Facebook has not seemed to hurt it. “We had different situations for different websites,” said Correa Esteves. “We had one website that had almost 12 percent of its traffic coming from Facebook – it was the one where we had really invested our energy in publishing social content. The visits coming from Facebook dropped. But terms of the whole audience, traffic on Nielsen and Comscore, nothing happened. And we’re glad we did it at 12 percent and not at 50 percent.” Asked what she would tell publishers who might be considering a similar move, Correa Esteves said: “I think they should look at the status of their website and of their business as a whole, like we did. We saw that the product’s audience was dropping, the content audience was dropping in Brazil, and maybe that’s not the same thing in other – different – markets. It really made sense for us, so you might as well analyze all the variables on your market and see if this makes sense for your company, too. And you should probably analyze what kind of dependency you have on Facebook – is it 10 percent, 50 percent, 90 percent?” However, Correa Esteves adds, “Globo is not against working and integrating with Facebook and other social media in a broader sense – we still think integration is very important. Our main point in our study was towards the Fanpage model. This editorial way of working the Facebook Page was what was hurting our business.” Report by WAN-IFRA Senior Editor Brian Veseling www.worldnewspublishingfocus.org Mariana Correa Esteves, Product Development Manager for Globo. com, Brazil and her colleague, Leandro Gejfinbein, Head of Market Intelligence and Analytics during a presentation at WAN-IFRA’s 12th International Newsroom Summit in Berlin. Globo.com site. What has changed is that
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