How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed
Of
all of Facebook’s superpowers, perhaps the most disconcerting is how it
can make online publishers disappear with the push of a button.
Think
I’m exaggerating? Just look at what happened to websites like Upworthy,
Viralnova and Distractify, which amassed enormous Facebook followings
and then faded from view
after the site’s algorithm started to weed out pages that published
hyperbolic headlines and low-value fluff. Other publishers that depend
on Facebook for a large portion of their traffic — which is to say, most
of them — fear they could be next under the guillotine.
But
there is also a remarkable story about longevity in the Facebook
publishing world. It comes, improbably, from Vilnius, Lithuania, where a
small but mighty digital publisher is successfully navigating the
changing tides of Facebook’s algorithms. Its story illustrates the
qualities needed to survive in today’s Facebook-dominated digital media
world: agility, lean operations, a clearly defined brand and a fair bit
of luck.
The company, Bored Panda,
might not be familiar to you. But if you have a Facebook account and a
pulse, you’ve probably seen its handiwork. Maybe it was “10+
Before-and-After Pics That Prove Men Look Better With Beards,” or “41
Times Uber Drivers Surprised Their Clients.” Or perhaps you watched
“Shh, Don’t Wake Them,” a 49-second video montage of dogs, cats and
hamsters sleeping peacefully.
Lightweight and
inoffensive posts like these have made Bored Panda one of the biggest
attractions on Facebook. Its page received more than 30 million likes,
shares, comments and reactions last month, far more than companies like
BuzzFeed, CNN and The New York Times, according to NewsWhip, which compiles data on social media publishers. Its website had 116 million visitors in October, according to its internal analytics.
The
company has done all this without raising outside funding, unlike
digital powerhouses such as BuzzFeed and Vice, which have collected
hundreds of millions of dollars. It also has only 41 employees, and the
low operating costs, along with its enormous popularity, have made for
good business. Tomas Banisauskas, Bored Panda’s founder, told me he
expects to be profitable this year with $20 million to $30 million in
revenue, mostly from the advertisements that appear on its website.
Roughly 90 percent of its web traffic comes from Facebook, making the
social network by far the biggest factor in Bored Panda’s success.
“They’re a really helpful company for us,” Mr. Banisauskas, 31, said of Facebook.
Bored
Panda began as a side project in 2009, while Mr. Banisauskas, then a
freelance videographer, was studying business administration at Vilnius
University. He was inspired by feats of internet creativity like the Million Dollar Homepage,
in which an entrepreneur auctioned off a million pixels on a website
for $1 each. And he came up with the idea for a website that would, as
he put it, “fight boredom with art and good news stories.”
On
the content side, Bored Panda’s strategy followed a familiar playbook.
It collected user-generated content from Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and
other social platforms and repackaged it with tempting headlines. But by
focusing on art, photography and other creative pursuits, and by
studiously sticking to the kind of apolitical content that few people
object to, Bored Panda has steadily built a feel-good, escapist empire.
Bored Panda has
the advantage of getting most of its content free from up-and-coming
artists and other creative types who want the kind of exposure a large
Facebook page can bring. (And, yes, it does ask for permission. I
contacted several artists whose work had been featured on Bored Panda,
and all said they’d given their blessing.) It has also adopted a
quality-over-quantity strategy that appears to have served it well. It
published only 519 articles in October, or roughly 16 posts a day,
according to NewsWhip. Compare that with CNN, which published 5,595
articles during the month, and Fox News, which published 51,919
articles.
It hasn’t been a straight
line to success. In its early days, Bored Panda relied on StumbleUpon, a
link aggregation site that was popular at the time, for much of its
traffic. But in 2010, according to Mr. Banisauskas, StumbleUpon sharply
reduced Bored Panda’s prominence on the site and pressured him to buy
ads instead.
As Mr. Banisauskas would later write in a post on Medium, the experience taught him that “the only way to survive in this industry is to build long-term value through loyal followers.”
The
next several years were a struggle, but in 2013, Bored Panda began to
see a spike in viewers being sent from a new source: Facebook. Its
positive, lighthearted content was a hit with the social network’s
users, and the site’s traffic grew tenfold in a single year. Soon,
despite Mr. Banisauskas’s intentions, Bored Panda was far from
self-sufficient — its prospects hinged almost entirely on Facebook.
More
recently, while its competitors have hedged their risks by diversifying
away from Facebook, Bored Panda has made a conscious effort to pull the
platform even closer. It has started several offshoot Facebook brands,
including pages for art and animal-themed stories, and a page called
Crafty Panda that focuses on D.I.Y. projects. It has begun creating
original content, too, and recently set up a video studio in its office,
a hospital from the 19th century that was converted into a tech office
complex.
“Everyone wants to be not so
dependent on Facebook,” Mr. Banisauskas told me. “At the same time, it’s
impossible — Facebook is the place where people share their ideas.”
But dependence comes with real risk. Last month, for example, Facebook
began testing a new design for its news feed. In this version, which is
being tested in six countries, Facebook posts from pages (including
businesses, public figures and publishers like Bored Panda) were removed
from the regular news feed. They were placed in a separate section
called “Explore Feed,” where they appeared less prominently.
This
change caused tremors in the Facebook publishing world. Several
publishers from countries included in the test complained that their
Facebook traffic had plummeted overnight. A social media manager from a
news site in Slovakia, one of the countries included in the test, called it the “biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen.”
Facebook told me it planned to continue testing the Explore Feed changes for several more months. In a blog post,
Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, wrote that the test was
meant to “understand if people prefer to have separate places for
personal and public content,” but that the company had “no plans to roll
this test out further.”
Rafat Ali, a
digital publishing veteran and chief executive of the travel media
company Skift, said that while these particular algorithmic changes
might not come to pass, sites like Bored Panda could still be easily
crushed by a future Facebook experiment.
“You never know when the rug could be pulled from under them,” Mr. Ali said. “They could be done in a year or two.”
Mr.
Banisauskas knows that Facebook can be a fickle landlord, and he
worries that as a small foreign company that specializes in aggregated
entertainment content, Bored Panda is in a more precarious position than
most. Roughly half of Bored Panda’s Facebook audience is American, and
Mr. Banisauskas worries that the site could be punished inadvertently by
efforts to combat fake news and Russian-style influence campaigns.
“We’re not part of the problem,” he said, “but we could get the collateral damage.”
Last
summer, Mr. Banisauskas traveled to New York to meet with a group of
other Facebook-focused publishers. All these companies produce
entertaining material that reaches millions of people every day. In
another era, that alone might have been enough to guarantee them a
stable future. Today, they exist at Facebook’s mercy and might be wiped
away at any moment.
For now, though, Bored Panda is charging ahead, and hoping to remain on Facebook’s good side.
“Everyone
should be worried,” Mr. Banisauskas said, before he injected a note of
Bored Panda-style positivity: “But I believe everything will work out
well.”
A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tiny Lithuanian Outfit Fights to Stay in Your Feed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/technology/facebook-bored-panda.html
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário