He is not stupid, so it's much more likely that he's just dishonest.
As I mentioned in a recent post about Facebook and cryptocurrency, Mark Zuckerberg has been spouting all kinds of noble babble about his company and its imagined mission. Generic stuff like connecting the world, togetherness and I don't know what. But while his been talking empty platitudes, Facebook are on a mission that has nothing to do with their generic mission statements.
Before I delve into Mark Zuckerberg's latest insincerities, let me talk a bit about the background.
Facebook's Business Model
Facebook has a very clear business model. They want as many people as possible to be on their network and they want them to stay for as long as possible. This allows them to learn a huge deal about each user and then allows them to sell laser-targeted advertising which businesses love and are happy to spend a lot of money on. This is so profitable and successful because of the huge amount of data that Facebook has on people's interests and identities. This makes targeted advertising quite efficient for the advertiser who pays for access to the exact type of people who are potential customers. The advertiser gets great ROI while Facebook manages to keep the prices high. For Facebook big data and user addiction are a science.
Facebook Pages
Something that Facebook did early on try and entice businesses to come to their platform was allow them to create Facebook pages. On those pages business could start cultivating a following which could be turned into customers. Of course, it was not only businesses that created Facebook pages, but all kinds of individuals who just wanted to run a fan page on their favorite topic, celebrity, show or whatever. This was great for Facebook because businesses were getting used to being part of their social network, there was all kinds of content posted from pages that kept users on the platform and most importantly, it allowed Facebook to learn a lot about what each user was actually interested in. And let's not forget that this is the information they are really selling to advertisers besides the generic stuff like location, gender and age.
Of course, many of those pages are also hurting the bottom line of the company as they siphon out users to media sites or turn Facebook users into clients for free without having to pay for advertising. So naturally, Mark and co. have gradually been decreasing the ability of pages to reach their audiences giving all kinds of excuses and explanations. But it's clear that the less business and media outlets can achieve for free, the more some of them are going to spend on advertising. Sure, many will be disgruntled and some might even leave the platform, but on the whole, their advertising revenue is going to go up because of that.
Mark Zuckerberg Pretending to Care About Our Well-Being
Keeping all of that context in mind, let's look at Mark Zuckerberg's latest post about how they want to make Facebook nicer for the users. Let's see a few quotes:
The usual spiel about how Mark and Facebook supposedly care about you...
Translation: We found an excuse to do something that will boost our profits.
Of course it's about our well-being! The fact that it's going to help them make more money is just an unfortunate coincidence.
In other words, they are going to do exactly what is best for their bottom line.
Oh, poor Facebook! I want this to be clear. Even if engagement drops, profits will go up.
To me it's 100% clear that this move is part of a long-term strategy to boost profits. Facebook is not cutting down on the reach of Facebook pages because they are bad for people or because people don't want to hear from them, but because by allowing pages to reach people, Facebook are leaking potential profits. It's a corporation that understands data and understands optimization. They have managed to make their advertising product one of the most popular ones on the market and they know that after expansion, it's time for optimization. All of this is about cutting the free-loaders out inevitably converting a portion of them to advertisers.
An Opportunity for STEEM
There are all kinds of online media outlets and there is a subset of them who have built up a large following on social media with Facebook being their primary traffic source. They range in size from huge ones like BuzzFeed to geeky little blogs full of awesome content. A lot of those outlets, bloggers and content creators and going to have their livelihoods endangered or destroyed by those changes that Facebook are going to implement this year.
They are obviously going to be looking for alternatives and a decentralized immutable blockchain where you can be paid directly by your audience could not only sound like a good solution for many of them, but actually be the best solution they have available. But if we want to take advantage of this growth opportunity, we need to make sure that they learn about it. And SMTs will only add even more value the what the STEEM blockchain could offer them.
On top of this, I do think there is a good way to not only attract some media outlets to our blockchain, but also advertisers, but I'm going to save that for one of my next posts.