Last week , Facebook ' s head of news partnerships Campbell Brown officially confirmed what everyone already knew at a meeting with media executives in Sydney , Australia , to propose a series of platform upgrades . She told the meeting attendees , " Mark doesn ' t care about publishers ." “ My supervisor is allowing me a lot of latitude and concessions to make these changes ,” she said . “ The reverse seems like I ' ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice ,” she remarked without Facebook ' s help .
It ' s bleak , but it ' s also truthful . Beginning in 2011 , Facebook ' s News Feed operated as a traffic firehose , with one well shared link generating massive
amounts of attention . Many websites attempted to turn Facebook SEO into a science , chasing those clicks for far longer than they should have , dramatically switching in the hopes of impressing Facebook users .
Around 2012 , the digital publishing ecosystem underwent a defining moment : Facebook overtook Google as the top traffic source on the web . Prior to Facebook , the best way to reliably obtain traffic was through search-engine optimization , formatting web content so that it would rank highly within search engines . SEO is a game of chance , a digital version of Quiz ! In which the person creating web content tries to think of the query that will get users to their web content . It ’ s like a trap for users to fall for by creators to market their content .
Because of Facebook ' s growing prominence as a referrer , a new sort of labour emerged : social media-optimized content . A decent piece of Facebookoptimized material had to be emotionally sophisticated , if exaggeratedly . It wasn ' t simply 21 photos that made you happy ; it was " 21 Photos Which Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity ." Or “ so and so celebrity wore a blingy dress ” it is “ a celebrity wore a blingy dress and I can ’ t even ”.