Whatever Meta's future, no platform is much without an audience
Rare moments of uncertainty in the social media world yield potential opportunities for those in the audience engagement business
Despite occasional extraordinary claims to the contrary by over-caffeinated technologists, this week has served as a reminder that humans remain the most important component in any given social media app.
Making an appearance on the witness stand this week - as the US Federal Trade Commission seeks to prove in court that Meta Platforms is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, by which it is illegal to keep a monopoly through anti-competitive practices – boss Mark Zuckerberg has been presented with a variety of evidence seeking to undermine his contention that, shock, Meta isn't an unlawful monopolist.
Once the hearings are complete, it will likely be several months before US District Judge James Boasberg delivers his findings. If Meta is found in violation of the antitrust legislation, then Boasberg will subsequently rule on whatever remedy is to be made, which could mean Meta being forced to sell Instagram and WhatsApp.
Few tears to be shed
Undoubtedly, a near unitary position among publishers is that a break-up of the Meta Monster would be a desirable thing. The grounds for such unity sits entirely in a desire to see greater competition brought to the digital distribution “market” – a vital part of the publishing business chain (and almost every other business) and which to a significant extent is under the exclusive control of a decreasing number of social and search companies.
Those same companies then harness that control to target the material they are really interested in, advertising dollars. Oh, and user habits data too, which in the grand scheme of things is probably worth more.
Take that level of control, get some photogenic VPs to write blog posts and statements about users being at the core of their mission, and you've got a money-printing machine.
The injection of meaningful competition into this market would be a blessing, for countless industries, even if only to prevent the world being awash with low-cost AI-gen slop as the lowest common denominator is pursued to creative oblivion.
I'd argue it would be a blessing too for Meta, in whatever shape it found itself after some economic heart surgery. No more would it need to waste billions on apps and features that go nowhere, or spend similar amounts just buying smaller competitors who do it better.
It would be leaner and more focused. And then hopefully it could just focus right off, perhaps into the cold, dead, pointless and really quite expensive Metaverse.
Networks no more
An interesting aspect of the Meta case is how the FTC characterised Meta apps Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as "personal social networking services", and this is where the human factor proves important for Meta.
To quote the WSJ: "Much of the case will turn on the FTC’s claim that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp dominate the 'personal social-networking' market. Consumers value the apps primarily as a way to stay in touch with friends and families, the FTC says. Snap, not owned by Meta, competes in the market, the FTC says. But TikTok, YouTube, X and Pinterest aren’t part of it, the FTC argues. They are entertainment or 'shared interest' apps that have a different purpose than personal social networks."
Zuckerberg maintains the position that Meta apps compete with all of the above, and rejects such separations of classification. He is right in that everyone is competing for eyeball time, publishers no different, yet that ignores the "social mechanics", to directly use a Zuckerberg phrase, that the apps are built on.
It's worth conjecting whether a "new Facebook" is even possible, and the answer likely seems "no". By that, I mean a new social network that nodes around personal connections, the few-hundred-odd people that even the most disagreeable of us seem able to draw within our loose orbit.
Yet such ready-made connections between groups remains the bedrock on which these apps are kickstarted – even if the content people see on the apps is less friend-driven than it was before.
So where could publishers sit in this moment of change? For them, substitute the term 'personal connections' with 'audience' or 'readership' or 'subscribers' or whatever, and that is where they potentially sit. From a Big Tech point of view, it's a high-quality place to be and such a closeness turns into commercial advantage when sat against advertising data, for example. It's where publishing used to sit, after all.
The app waters are generally turbulent at the moment. Do not forget the condition known as TikTok Limbo, a state of both being and not being, and being owned by who knows who, now or in the future. A new deadline has been set for June for TikTok to be sold by Chinese owners ByteDance.
Regarding X, it seems likely to run into some kind of punitive EU trouble soon, given the political climate, though after its cross-sell to xAI its value seems to lie in being a LLM training device more than an actual social media platform. You can probably say that about any social network not named above.
Sometimes I find it important to remind myself - and publishers - that the internet does exist without platforms, and will continue to exist as they come and go.
You can publish directly to it, you know, as publishers have done since before any of the entities mentioned above even existed.
While the old idea that uncertainty sells news is still valid, we've all seen that the value of that news sits less and less with the people who report it.
In this case though, uncertainty in the world of distribution might just lever open some rare opportunities to help redress that shift in balance.
Know thy reader, dear publisher, it truly is the future.
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