I'm extremely torn between "This is an outrage" and "Buyer beware."
Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook. They took a calculated market risk and the gamble didn't pay off (and they don't have enough reserve capital to survive a failed gamble). In an ideal market, the back-stop on this behavior would be "Nobody trusts Facebook's self-reported numbers moving forward."
Is that a sufficient back-stop, or should there be (further) government intervention?
Nope nobody forced them to compete on FB. They would've been quite silly had they not at least tried to capture the FB market - but I think the false reporting of views is something that really shocked the folks trying to balance the books - their videos still seemed to be performing great while the revenue was slowing down. FB isn't responsible for tempting CH over (and CH made the right choice giving it a try) but FB is responsible for viewership reporting that borders on fraudulent as they try to boost their own overall numbers.
We should put responsibility where it lies: Facebook and YouTube aren't causing video view numbers to decrease; users are choosing to stay in the FB / YT ecosystems rather than seek out some third-party website.
Having seen both the performance and ad-blast of Cracked's website, I can understand why. FB and YT are a better user experience.
Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook.
Yep. Their mistake was they believed the hype. A bunch of publishers did. "Facebook is the future!" and 90% of newsrooms started pushing their original content to Facebook, sacrificing their own ad views.
Fortunately, most of the big J players have seen the folly in this already and reversed course. Usually they build their own platform because they have many media properties. But I see a lot of small market and independent publishers still stuck in the "Facebook is king" mentality because of middle managers who are still stuck in the old echo chamber.
Nobody forced College Humor, Funny or Die, or any of the other companies that shifted resources to believe Facebook. They took a calculated market risk and the gamble didn't pay off (and they don't have enough reserve capital to survive a failed gamble). In an ideal market, the back-stop on this behavior would be "Nobody trusts Facebook's self-reported numbers moving forward."
Is that a sufficient back-stop, or should there be (further) government intervention?