This Week in Social and Digital (Week of January 2)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
Auto-Captioning for Facebook Videos Coming to All US Pages (Read more at TechCrunch)
Facebook is bringing its automatic video captioning tool to US English Facebook Pages after it was quietly unrolled to some publisher Pages and a handful of others starting in October. The tool uses voice recognition technology to evaluate videos and suggest subtitles, which can then be checked for errors and edited as needed, which over time will improve the software as it learns from edits of users.
Facebook’s offering this tool for free in an effort to help marketers better leverage auto-play videos, which play without sound by default in the Facebook News Feed. Marketers can access the tool through a new “Generate” button in the video editor. Facebook will then show the subtitles in pieces for review and editing.
Videos that rely on sound simply aren’t effective on Facebook, and optimizations such as Facebook allow users to engage with content from their mobile devices while on-the-go and in public settings.
Facebook is viewing itself as a video-first platform, and if it wants others to view it as that as well, it needs to offer tools to make video sharing and optimization as simple as possible. This is one more step in that direction as it looks to lure greater media dollars and compete with the Internet’s video giant, YouTube.
Medium Moves Away from Ad-Driven Revenue Stream (Read more at Digiday)
Medium founder Ev Williams says that the ad system is broken and is shutting down Medium’s native ad sales services to focus on payments from readers.
Medium had only been offering branded content at the beta level, starting last year. This occurred after Medium’s launch in 2012 as a blogging platform that had evolved to offer its own editorial staff creating exclusive content. Today, it also has publishers using Medium to distribute content and broaden their audiences.
That’s where Medium finds itself. It’s a platform with incredible content but an advertising model that’s not working for it. That’s what will make this shift by the platform so interesting as it looks to rethink what monetization looks like for online publishing.
It has some serious things going for it, including readership on posts up 300% year over year. From a broader perspective, Ev Williams is one of the biggest shareholders of Twitter, which generates most of its revenue from advertising. The implications of Williams’ POV on advertising may apply to Twitter as well, but that’s likely further out.
Facebook Hires Head of News Partnerships (Read more on Facebook)
Facebook has hired former NBC and CNN journalist Campbell Brown to serve as its head of news partnerships, a position Facebook recently started looking for following critiques in the platform’s role in distributing fake news.
Brown’s role will be to wok with journalists to use Facebook to expand their reach, while gathering feedback from publishers for Facebook to use in the development of new tools and features. Brown will also be the public face of Facebook when it comes to news and its dissemination.
This news obviously comes amidst criticism of fake news being distributed on Facebook, but it’s also important for Facebook’s relationship with publishers. They are looking to Facebook more and more as a driver of site traffic, in addition to using Facebook features such as instant articles and video.
News Quick Hits
- The end of Vine officially has a date. It will shut down on January 17 and will transition to the Vine Camera app. Previous Vines will still be available for viewing after the app has shut down, but they will no longer be available for download. (Read more at Mashable)
- Twitter is partnering with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to live stream the red carpet action for the Golden Globes. This is another partnership added to Twitter’s considerable number of live streaming partners. (Read more at Twitter)