As concern over fake news and how to beat it becomes a global concern, publishers are looking to build or strengthen their own competencies to be able to better distribute their content without compromising on quality. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, UK Prime Minister Theresa May was rather vocal about the pressure applied on tech companies to respond faster to extremist content on social media platforms. More recently, FMCG giant Unilever threatened to take its advertising dollars away from Google and Facebook if the tech giants did not clean up the ‘swamp’ within which extremist and illegal content finds space. At the core are issues regarding fake news that prominently came to the fore during the 2016 US elections and have only snowballed since. Facebook shook the system up when it announced changes to its news feed earlier this year, which will bring back the focus on showing people more content from their first degree connections.
This will essentially make advertisers and publishers fight harder for the audience’s attention and doing so will effectively cost them more. Sakal Media Group’s CEO Pradeep Dwivedi says there is a decline in the audience that was coming in via the content discovery mode. He adds, “In case of Sakal, the brand has a large resonance with the Marathi-speaking population, so a lot of people that were coming in via Facebook have started to come directly.” In the initial stages, this is about 10-15% of the audience. Rajiv Bansal, chief digital officer and CEO, HT Digital Streams, shares that while the short-term numbers are being impacted, the interest is on cultivating an audience base that is habitual and loyal to its platforms. FilterCopy, a digital entertainment brand owned by Pocket Aces, had, at noon on February 13, released a video titled ‘Little things couples do’, which, within the first three hours, garnered close to a million views. Gobble, the company’s food-centric brand, reportedly has had its best month in January. Both FilterCopy and Gobble create content that inherently has high shareability and engagement value. The recent change by Facebook, where a good chunk of the traffic comes from the pages, is conducive for it to grow.
