Facebook Puts a Downer on Upworthy

Even without action by Facebook like this, it's been clear to me for ages that Upworthy's lifespan will be very, very limited. People will only keep clicking on those links until they build up enough "mental antibodies" to linkbait headlines, and I'm betting most people will hit that point within a year or so. (How many people do you know who still pass along email chain letters about some mysterious kid with cancer?) I'm sure there's a core group that will keep sharing Upworthy links forever, but if they haven't already hit a peak in popularity I expect that they will soon.

&quot;Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next.&quot;<p>The start of the article is gold.

One thing I think a lot of people forget is that Facebook is incredibly customizable after you give it a few signals.<p>After college I made a list of &quot;who would I avoid (or maybe not even recognize) if I saw them out in public&quot; and removed them from my friend list.<p>After that came the &quot;baby photo&quot; stage - if someone posted too many images that didn&#x27;t interest me, I told Facebook that I wasn&#x27;t interested in seeing updates from those people anymore.<p>Similar to the Facebook gaming spam a few years back, I simply just removed updates from any site or app that contained content I wasn&#x27;t interested in seeing anything from (BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Zynga games, etc).<p>My newsfeed is now a finely tuned machine, where I get updates from my close circles and occasionally from news sites I enjoy.<p>Point being, you can virtually customize Facebook as much as you want so I&#x27;m not sure what the disconnect is here. I wouldn&#x27;t expect Gmail to be perfectly tailored to my preferences the first time I created an account. I figure the same thing applies with Facebook.

The divisive effect that Upworth (and BuzzFeed) have had on Facebook users has been interesting to observe.<p>Personally, the influx of links from these relatively content-less sites has really decreased the usefulness of my news feed--in fact, I get a little bothered whenever I see this stuff appear. That said, it’s evident that _someone_ wants these links to be on Facebook, given that _someone_ had to post them in the first place.<p>Perhaps it’s just evidence of the split between newsfeed presence and wall presence (i.e., it could be consistent to argue that those who post Upworth yadn BuzzFeed links don’t necessarily want them to gain attention beyond the Wall on which they’re posted), but I prefer to see it as a microcosm of two contrasting groups of Facebook users: one that sees Facebook as a way to share “fun”, “light” content, and another that wants it to be a meaningful exchange of personal information and ideas.

I fixed the upworthy problem on my facebook feed by doing &quot;hide all stories from upworthy&quot; and then unfriending 2 people I was loosely attached to who kept discussing upworthy posts or somehow getting around that block. Haven&#x27;t seen any upworthy stories in the past few months, other than articles about how horrible Upworthy is.<p>Also happy there are virtually zero baby photos in my feed, and plenty of cat pictures, news stories, political debates (NSA, immigration, tax policy, guns, war), etc. It&#x27;s pretty much perfect.<p>Basically no games or game invites; you can block individual games, but a couple people kept inviting me to new ones -- gone!<p>Being willing to &quot;unfollow&quot; or &quot;unfriend&quot; people who are polluting your feed goes a long way.

I disagree with the premise that the Facebook Algorithm update in December caused the drop. Here’s why:<p>1. As far as Quantcast data goes, ViralNova held steady in December (<a href="https://www.quantcast.com/viralnova.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantcast.com&#x2F;viralnova.com</a>)<p>2. Utrend.tv grew in December (<a href="https://www.quantcast.com/utrend.tv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantcast.com&#x2F;utrend.tv</a>)<p>3. Distractify.com grew from ~ 15m in Nov to 45m in December. (<a href="https://www.quantcast.com/distractify.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantcast.com&#x2F;distractify.com</a>)<p>In other words, Upworthy clones all grew or remained steady in December while Upworthy traffic declined. I’m not going to speculate on the months after December, but to suggest that Facebook cracked down on these “viral” sites seems to go against the small amount of data that we have available via Quantcast.<p>It seems to me like Upworthy just had a subpar December, especially with the growth of new entrants.

Reddit users have been begging reddit to make this change for years -- recognizing that meme&#x2F;pic upvotes are each less value than other (larger) content upvotes, since pics are easier to skim without leaving the stream.<p>Facebook is overtaking reddit in the Quality algorithm department.

Ironically, Upworthy won &quot;Fastest Rising Startup&quot; at the Crunchies last night.<p>Things change quickly in the world of startups.

Next up, can they please block any article originating from the Huffington Post since they seem to have morphed from a Drudge Report clone into some kind of Viralnova&#x2F;Buzzfeed love child?

Good. Upworthy ads (and those of its many, many clones) are obnoxious.

I own a similar content network, but we have since broke it up into multiple niche properties to avoid having one massive neck to choke like Upworthy.<p>In the past fb has issued domain wide bans on properties I&#x27;ve owned if we were getting a little too savvy in exploiting their edge rank algo.<p>This &quot;pass thru&quot; traffic is amongst the least valuable on the internet, believe me, we have tried everything under the sun to monetize visitors, adsense, every ad network, affiliate, etc.<p>Believe it or not the best thing we&#x27;ve figured out is to use the authority of a massively viral website to help us rank terms in google on the backend. All comes full circle, lol.

The article comes to the wrong conclusion. Facebook isn&#x27;t trying to get Upworthy to buy ads. Facebook is trying to get NBC, Mercedes, Prada to buy ads by convincing them Facebook is a place where monied people get their news. Like Twitter did a couple of years ago, Facebook now realizes its best bet is to become a media dissemination company.

<i>Facebook Inc. changed its newsfeed algorithm. You’ll never believe what happened to Upworthy’s traffic next.</i><p>A little subtle humor from our friends at Bloomberg! This is the type of sly writing I&#x27;d expect from the Economist.

I&#x27;ve seen Upworthy work from up close and from my experience this post misses out of a few keys.<p>1) The process that drives Upworthy&#x27; success is the way they write and TEST headlines. Sure their current title types won&#x27;t work forever, but they are incredibly good and testing and improving on processes. I would expect this to continue.<p>2) The majority of sharing (and thus traffic from) facebook is done on individual profiles (and not the organization&#x27;s facebook page). One video I worked on was shared by 90,000 individuals. Accessing the profiles of that many people is the key to making FB work for any organization. This focus on the page is misguided.<p>Sure the reduction in reach from their fanpage will impact their ability to spark initial interest, but that&#x27;s just one of the channels they use.

FINALLY. I am so tired of those ridiculous sensationalist headlines... I actually installed Facebook Purity and put in filters to block &quot;you won&#x27;t believe what happened&quot; and the like... Only issue is that doesn&#x27;t block them on my mobile apps :\

this is probably the best thing that facebook has done with its news feed algorithm. I&#x27;ve also started seeing a lot less of posts from friends who tended to overpost.. Looks like they&#x27;re getting things right with that. On the other hand almost every second post is a promoted post or an ad - overkill.

&gt;Then, in December, Facebook announced a change to the algorithm it uses to determine what kinds of updates (&quot;stories&quot;) users see in the News Feeds. In a blog post, Facebook said it wanted to feature more &quot;high quality&quot; content and fewer &quot;meme photos.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s interesting, it assumes that everyone wants &quot;high quality&quot; over memes. Funny thing is, many people I know go to Facebook just for the memes, the high quality stuff comes from elsewhere. Facebook doesn&#x27;t let the user choose?

<i>sighs</i> Upworthy is not building on FB&#x27;s turf. They need people to share their content in order to get pageviews and FB is just one platform where people commonly share stuff.<p>If you claim they are, then EVERY single content publisher is building on FB&#x27;s turf because they rely on people sharing their content. You can&#x27;t have it both ways.

I&#x27;ve noticed less viral links (Upworthy, BuzzFeed) and more pure garbage memes (photos and Vine-like videos hosted on FB that go viral based on Likes and comments).<p>Either way my News Feed is a river of crap akin to reddit&#x2F;r&#x2F;pics. And then in a Kafkaesque moment I realize that this business is worth 167 billion dollars.

But now how will I get links to email forward-quality articles in my precious Facebook feed? :(

If Facebook made it easy to control your News Feed so that only your friends&#x27; original content (photos and status updates) could show up in it, I think this problem would largely be solved.

Best news all year!