Facebook is Eating the Media

[Commentary] The role of headlines shifted from convincing Google’s bots of their relevance to enticing casual Facebook users to click, like, and share. But the game may be about to change one more time.

Facebook explained to its partners in the media that it’s seeing a big increase in people watching videos in its news feed. It’s no surprise because Facebook recently began playing videos posted to its news feed automatically, rather than waiting for users to click on them. Here’s the catch: Videos only auto-play on Facebook when you upload them directly to Facebook. The side effect of posting a video on Facebook is to make Facebook the publisher of that video and to demote your web site to the role of producer. Any advertising attached to the video will likely be controlled by Facebook, not by you, as it would be if you had hosted it on your web site. Eventually, Facebook will set the terms for the sharing of revenue from videos posted in its news feed, and those terms will be very favorable to Facebook -- probably more so than the terms set by YouTube, which for all its success is far less important than Facebook as a portal to the broader Web. And then each website will have to decide for itself whether to accept those terms.