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There are only four staffers present, plus my boss and two interns, and I was one of the interns. The four staffers were in Old Town, and our audience/Facebook specialist was in Atlanta, Georgia. We had no idea what Rare was, what it could be, what it would be or even what to do that day, but we were there, and we had a vague idea that Facebook was going to be the key to our ascent.
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No eyeballs became 10 million unique monthly visits, and then 10 million became 22 million. Traffic was consistent, only going up and only going to continue skyrocketing, because this space was ours for the taking.
Organic. Reach.
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Audience acquisition increases, and, adding up our pages, we’re in the millions of likes — closer to 10 million than 1 million.
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What?! 10,000 people are on our website? How could this be?
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What?! Twenty thousand people are on our website right now? This becomes routine, ...
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2016, the circus that it was, would prove to be the beginning of the end of our reign and the reigns of others.
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Daily traffic goalposts began to move, if not to make ourselves feel better about the drop-off then just out of sheer inevitability. One could not simply expect to achieve the kind of Wild West numbers we’d gotten used to any longer. Since I was the most successful traffic person ever at Rare, easily surpassing 250 million views on my articles in my time there, I took solving the traffic problem very personally.
What I didn’t know at the time, since my understanding of The Almighty Facebook Algorithm and its potentially crushing effects was in its infancy, was that the drop-off wasn’t my fault, and that I had little capacity to change it.
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While the content we were creating was by no means fake, untrue or as shameless as that of the profiteers mentioned in the article, publishers that had achieved viral success, it seems, were deemed guilty by association.
All you have to do is read the timeline of Facebook News Feed updates and the articles about them to see how The Social Network cracked down on clickbait, hoaxes, Russian conspiracies, “fake news” and non-timely stories, and also how it responded to intense censure, even from Barack Obama, for the role it played in Trump’s election.
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The easiest way to police these kinds of things is sweeping policy change through the News Feed algorithm, not playing whack-a-mole with individual crackdowns. Think of it as a blanket nerf for link news, especially among sites that are not considered “trusted sources.”
At the time, it was more painful than it had ever been, but we didn’t yet know how catastrophic it would become.
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At the beginning of 2017, on pages with 1 million-plus audiences, stories that once easily eclipsed 100,000 organic reach might, at best, hover around 40,000. By the end of the year, “caught-on-video” posts, for example, which were reliably clicked in the past, could go unseen altogether.
The steep decline was crippling, and the desperation only bred more of the same. The loud and first death knell came around October 2017, when all posts on Rare News and Rare People were getting about 1,000 reach, sometimes less.
When we contacted Facebook about this, rightly believing the cause wasn’t that the content team had forgotten what it learned, we discovered that we had been erroneously classified as an “ad farm.” Oh, the irony.
Here’s how that happened: to combat restricted reach, we had to increase our number of website ads to boost our revenue per 1,000 clicks (RPM). Facebook had just hired employees to find practices it deemed nefarious. Because we were flagged — and they pointed to one of our stories to support this judgement — we were slapped with even less reach.
Facebook listed best practices that might get us back on track, and we earnestly sought to improve our performance across the board through increased story length, selection of the most relevant stories and narratives, inclusion of appropriate social media embeds, toned-down headlines and rigorous attention to our social media setups.
The strike against us was removed, and we saw more positive results from November through December.
This was a mirage.
Then January 2018 happened. “More Local News on Facebook,” “Helping Ensure News on Facebook Is From Trusted Sources” and “Bringing People Closer Together,” The Social Network promised.
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On March 1, 2018, it was revealed to all employees that Fans 1st Media would be closing its doors at the end of the month.
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More:
https://rare.us/rare-news/the-media/...d-by-facebook/
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