A few weeks ago Facebook changed the algorithm that determines what content you see in your news feed. Supposedly this change was to improve the quality of the stories people see. Fewer stupid cat photos more news stories. It was only coincidence that it had the effect of decreasing the number of people that brand pages were reaching, forcing the owners of those pages to buy ads in order to reach the same audience that they had previously paid Facebook to reach by setting up the pages. And I am sure that it was a coincidence that this occurred right in the middle of the Christmas shopping season when the page owners really need to get their posts out to the widest possible audience. Right? Well meet Stephanie Siavetti who would beg to differ:
I have 8,000 followers. Over the past few months my engagement has slowed to less than a trickle – a tiny fraction of what it was at the beginning of the year. Now, when I post to my Facebook page for The Culinary Life, only 100 people see those posts (on average). Facebook then tries to charge me $20 so that you can see my content. Given that I don’t make any money from the stories and photos I post – please note there are not any ads on my site – paying hundreds of dollars a month to access you, the fans who willingly liked my page, is just not possible.
To make matter worse, Facebook has been charging page owners to run ads, which is in essence buying followers. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but when they charge to grow a page’s following and then remove access to those very same followers after they’ve accepted money for them, well, I find that incredibly unethical…
She isn't the only one, apparently a lot of businesses operating brand pages noticed the same thing.
Facebook of course denies that there was such motivation in the changes.
Personally I think the truth is somewhere in the middle - Facebook probably did have this change planned for months, to improve user experience, but I also believe that they knew damn good and well that rolling it out when and how they did would have a positive impact on their ad sales.
I don't know if this is actually unethical, you can probably find people to argue both sides, but my feeling is that once you take money you have a duty to honor the deal and Facebook appears to be reneging here.
On a side note, this fits in with why I don't trust cloud providers, once you let control of this stuff out of your hands (your brand presence, your data, whatever) then you it isn't really your's anymore.
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