58 Distribute and Be Damned
clear market leader is Facebook. As Google rose to prominence over early
innovators, Facebook emerged to take market share from predecessors
such as MySpace and Friendster. Kirkpatrick traces the early – and now
famous – rise of Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin’s Harvard dorm project to a company worth $15 billion in the space
of half a dozen years,
69
and by the time of its IPO in 2012, the company
was valued at $104 billion, the largest for a new public company at the
time (though subsequently surpassed by that for Alibaba in 2014). By the
end of that year, the site had passed a billion users (although later counts
would question how many of those were authentic accounts), growing
to 1.86 billion by the beginning of 2017. For a period of time between
2013 and 2015, it was the largest website in the world according to Alexa.
com (a position it has since ceded to Google and YouTube), during which
time it transformed its relations with users’ consumption of media via
the News Feed.
Initially, Facebook had concentrated on allowing users to comment
on each other’s’ profiles or walls, but as it began to concentrate on providing a steady stream of new stories, it categorised these as a newsfeed,
a basic aggregator of posts that members of the site would like based
on their preferences expressed through likes and connections to friends
and other users. In March 2013, the company announced that it intended to redesign the site “to reduce clutter and focus more on stories
from the people you care about”.
70
Initially, the focus of the blog was
on friends – their photos as well as posts they made or ones that arose
from pages that users followed. The redesign was particularly important
in terms of making the site more mobile friendly, and it was rolled out
slowly over subsequent months. According to Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager for News Feed at the time, the average user’s feed had
1,500 possible stories per day in 2013 but only 20 per cent were served
up by Facebook’s algorithm.
71
The commercial appeal of the changes
was easily demonstrable in the form of autoplay adverts, which became
much more common in the revised feed and contributed to Facebook’s
increased profitability, while larger photos gave the feed more impact
and the algorithm was modified to include more “high quality” news
stories, that is content from commercial and other suppliers.
The effects of the revised News Feed were profound, although the
full implications would not be recognised immediately. In its efforts to
create what Zuckerberg referred to as the “perfect personalized newspaper” for every person in the world,
72
Facebook appeared to have consolidated almost two decades of digital mass-customisation. The very
earliest news websites in the mid-1990s, such as Hotwired and Time
Pathfinder, sought to use the power of digital over print to allow end
users to focus on the content that mattered to them. In these earliest
instances, the intention of publishers was to maintain users within their
own sites, but very quickly portals developed such as MSN, AOL, and
clear market leader is Facebook. As Google rose to prominence over early
innovators, Facebook emerged to take market share from predecessors
such as MySpace and Friendster. Kirkpatrick traces the early – and now
famous – rise of Facebook from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin’s Harvard dorm project to a company worth $15 billion in the space
of half a dozen years,
69
and by the time of its IPO in 2012, the company
was valued at $104 billion, the largest for a new public company at the
time (though subsequently surpassed by that for Alibaba in 2014). By the
end of that year, the site had passed a billion users (although later counts
would question how many of those were authentic accounts), growing
to 1.86 billion by the beginning of 2017. For a period of time between
2013 and 2015, it was the largest website in the world according to Alexa.
com (a position it has since ceded to Google and YouTube), during which
time it transformed its relations with users’ consumption of media via
the News Feed.
Initially, Facebook had concentrated on allowing users to comment
on each other’s’ profiles or walls, but as it began to concentrate on providing a steady stream of new stories, it categorised these as a newsfeed,
a basic aggregator of posts that members of the site would like based
on their preferences expressed through likes and connections to friends
and other users. In March 2013, the company announced that it intended to redesign the site “to reduce clutter and focus more on stories
from the people you care about”.
70
Initially, the focus of the blog was
on friends – their photos as well as posts they made or ones that arose
from pages that users followed. The redesign was particularly important
in terms of making the site more mobile friendly, and it was rolled out
slowly over subsequent months. According to Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager for News Feed at the time, the average user’s feed had
1,500 possible stories per day in 2013 but only 20 per cent were served
up by Facebook’s algorithm.
71
The commercial appeal of the changes
was easily demonstrable in the form of autoplay adverts, which became
much more common in the revised feed and contributed to Facebook’s
increased profitability, while larger photos gave the feed more impact
and the algorithm was modified to include more “high quality” news
stories, that is content from commercial and other suppliers.
The effects of the revised News Feed were profound, although the
full implications would not be recognised immediately. In its efforts to
create what Zuckerberg referred to as the “perfect personalized newspaper” for every person in the world,
72
Facebook appeared to have consolidated almost two decades of digital mass-customisation. The very
earliest news websites in the mid-1990s, such as Hotwired and Time
Pathfinder, sought to use the power of digital over print to allow end
users to focus on the content that mattered to them. In these earliest
instances, the intention of publishers was to maintain users within their
own sites, but very quickly portals developed such as MSN, AOL, and