How a specialised Social media can fix the 'business' & 'trust' in News media.

Let's talk about two industries.

While I am writing this, OTT revenues in US are expected to rise by 40% in 2018. Netflix commands the largest market share which is driven largely by subscriptions. Back home in India, Hotstar maintains dominance followed by Voot & Amazon. On revenue front almost everybody is struggling with monthly ARPU as low as $3-4. Primarily in India, OTT players are largely dependent on advertising. In some cases, like Hotstar, a freemium model is working where one pays for certain selected content, while the rest is supported by advertising.

With mobile & internet penetration increasing, thanks to Mukesh Bhai and his Jio, the OTT market is expected to grow 35% YoY from its current size of $280mn. However, subscription revenues are still low & this is likely to continue in the near future. Primarily and largely the content on all the Indian OTT platforms is entertainment & music. News & information also acquire a very small chunk.

The overall picture for the OTT market in India looks bright and the sun has just risen. Wait as more and more young Indians start ‘cutting the chord’, the popular American phrase which implies cutting cable wires.

Now..

While I am writing this, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the EU from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law. This is because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect on May 25 in Europe. FB will be charged 4% of its annual turnover in case it violates privacy law, hence the shift is to move FB out of the ambit of the law.

The Cambridge Analytica (CA) episode justifies why fake news, misinformation and targeted newsfeeds were rampant during the US elections. Surprisingly, a lot of fuss was made here in India about BJP, Congress and many other political parties being clients of CA. Although all the parties immediately got into damage control mode, it was evident that politicians across the globe have the same DNA and hence cannot be trusted. But neither can be a social media platform like Facebook. A lot has already been written about privacy so I shall not talk about that here.

The bigger question here is: can we trust (or rather should we) Facebook or any similar social media platform with news or information in the future? In fact over the past few years a lot of people (primarily the passive citizens in democracy) have started using FB as a platform to express their political leanings and standings. The kind of content they read and share, the kind of biased arguments they make, displays a lot about their political leanings. To be fair, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements were literally formed on Facebook. So were millions of debating societies and support movements. But eventually so were millions of fake communities, pages, and manufactured news in order to manufacture consent to support a bigger agenda.

To be fair, it’s not Facebook’s fault completely. It wasn’t designed as a political or news based platform at all. The founders of FB had insisted (and still do) that they created Facebook as a platform to connect and socialise virtually. People at FB understood technology best, but failed to understand humanity. They still maintain they are a technology company but have eventually become a giant media empire. In the end, it’s human nature to discuss subjects, topics, and everything they know when they socialise. In FB’s case they just happened to do it on a platform where they socialised the most and secondly the platform was the first of its kind. Precisely the reason why Whatsapp too has become a big source & platform for spreading fake news and misinformation.

A somewhat similar case can be made for Twitter, which is certainly more about news than Facebook will ever be. The user base of Twitter is not even 30% of Facebook and the reach of Twitter is not amongst the majority. However, Twitter too has had its share of problems in forms of of trolls and abuses which is the biggest challenge for the company and they are still struggling with it. However, Q4 2018 was the first profitable quarter for the company since its formation. The micro blogging site has increased the word limit of tweets & made some policy changes regarding abuse handling

What all these events suggest is that if a social media platform is free, and has news or eventually becomes a news based platform (Primarily political & religious) at its core there will be agenda driven bias, attempt to malign, propaganda spreading, fake news dissipation, etc.

But the irony is that even in real life, eventually any socialising event where one meets strangers as well as acquaintances, becomes a social hub where one talks about the world around. Be it politics, religion, environment, social issues, economics, climate change, education, women’s rights, etc. Social interaction by its very definition is coming together of individuals from varied backgrounds and discussing subjects which commonly interest them. It’s not rocket science, but basic human nature. Social media and news are inseparable twins.

The staff of news distribution (&creation) is expanding

Even Stand-up comedians today use news or topical subjects in their scripts and are quite successful. Not only is it contemporary but also addresses one basic fact which has changed about news and information in the post internet world. People now have a take on ‘news’. Or probably it’s more evident now than it was before. As literacy and education have increased, people have more opinions, bias and their own idea of how the world works. They consume a lot more content and information than probably a decade ago. Hence they might want to contest any opinion which doesn’t match theirs. In some cases they even have an ownership of 'news'. With a tweet an individual becomes a broadcaster in his own right. On digital platforms the biggest news networks are competing with frugal news content creators.The modern world of internet has changed the way news is dissipated and served

News distribution therefore, has become multi-way and is eliminating gatekeepers. There is a strong reason why the people from the Journalism fraternity are genuinely trolled on SM. People, especially youth have started moving away from TV news. Debates on news channels today have become extremely non-credible.

These days, people don’t want an ‘intellectual news anchor’ telling them what is black and white. People are intellectual themselves.

New age people have started understanding (and with real life case studies of the past) the functioning and abuse of power by the media & the mechanism of manufacturing consent. Hence the trust deficit on media networks (no matter left or right) is all time high.

Therefore News business is expanding

FB in the recent past had relied heavily on videos for engagement (a lot of which was news) but tweaked its policy recently citing consumer preferences, which irked news publishers globally. Almost all the big news publishers of the world are annoyed with the way Facebook has handled news distribution on its platform and its likely to get worse with time.

Why I mentioned OTT in the beginning: FB has long been waiting to get into the OTT business. They have hired a bunch of Hollywood producers and writers on board. FB was expected to come out with a separate video platform by May, but things may get a little late due to the CA scandal.

From business point of view FB will not have a customer acquisition cost unlike the Netflix and the Amazons of the world. The social media giant already has more than 2 billion people on the platform, hence the FB OTT will have a potential reach of 2 billion from day one! And mind you, this is not because of the ‘content’ they will serve on the OTT, but because of the Social media networking the platform already provides. Even Snapchat is following suit and is roping content creators to pump up the engagement.

The bottomline is that no Social Media can rely only on ‘user generated content’ but will eventually need ‘Professional Content’ in the future to keep the engagement scores high (Why FB is launching its own OTT). Equally true is the fact that no content provider can rely on content alone but will eventually need a social media interaction around it to keep the platform engaging (Remember why FB OTT will have 2 bn subscribers from day one).

But Content meant to entertain cannot be clubbed with content meant to inform. And this differentiation is not only ethical, but makes complete sense in business.

Social Media for News

Imagine a BBC or a Vice Media launching their own virtual social media network tomorrow inviting people to come & participate in news discussions. Not only will one have rich, informative and verified content made by the media network on one hand, but also genuine interactions with genuine people on the other.

It is 2018 & it’s time for specialised social media which also serves specialised content. In this context: news & information. It’s high time that we learn from the past and let a media company use technology to create something like a ‘facebook for news’. And not let a technology company land itself in the space of media & news and then commit mistakes they don’t understand themselves. We need journalists & editors in the founding team of such a SM who understand the nuances of mass media and information and its correlation with society.

Like I said earlier, that eventually the purpose of any social media will be discussions once they are beyond connections. With internet now moving to 5Gs this is very much possible and we need to think beyond typical arrangements of a social media network. It’s high time for a decentralized niche social media with only news content & news interactions around it. More importantly it needs to be positioned that way and not to be kept under the guise of ‘connecting people’.

Let people come and talk. Let people participate in fact based discussions. Let people voice their opinions among people who are involved on ground and are doing something about solving issues & not any opinionated Sukesh or shamshad who have blurred views on issues & have made ranting & trolling others on the internet their business. Let people feel a part of news, and let them contribute to it.

With this mechanism only genuine & serious people with real facts and interests will be joining the network (as the place is not for people who share dinner with candles, or holiday picture & occasionally rant their opinionated points on subjects). To make matters more serious a payment wall for social media should be introduced. Let people not pay for content. Let them pay for interactions and social media networking.

In today's time specialised SM networks like Reditt & Linkedin are offering much more to the consumers than the mass ones.

Since decades we have clubbed 'Media & Entertainment' as one sector. It's high time we start differentiating between the two and treat them as separate sectors based on their objectives & outcomes in society. No SM can take the place of Mainstream Media (MSM). But a decentralized specialised social media for news, controlled by the people will keep a very firm check on the MSM.

It’s high time we need to get to the root of the problem now. Times have changed, people have changed, therefore delivery of news, and engagement with news, needs to change too.

More to follow on the mechanisms & details of such a platform at @StreetJournos.

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