YouTube is a much safer bet for publishers looking to create a sustainable video business than Facebook, Inc. and Fast Company Entertainment VP Scott Mebus told Digiday. Inc. and Fast Company released nine new video series on YouTube earlier this month, having described the move as the latest step in their video ambitions which started with clips hosted by their own websites but is now expanding to YouTube after their content teams ended up being combined several months back. “YouTube made good sense because Facebook is unreliable,” Mr. Mebus said.
The unreliability of the world’s largest social media network has been criticized by numerous publishers, both media outlets and entertainment content creators, in recent times. The most controversial change Facebook opted for late last year came in the form of a radically revamped News Feed which deprioritized content posted by Pages as part of a move the company described as a return to its roots, maintaining its platform has always been about connecting people with friends and not brands. Critics largely dismissed those claims, arguing the change is effectively a nuclear response to Facebook’s fake news problem that the firm still isn’t able to control; by drastically reducing the amount of news it shows on its landing page, Facebook is consequently also drastically reducing the volume of fake news disseminated on its platform seeing how it isn’t able to identify and remove such misleading and false stories in a timely manner otherwise, some industry watchers believe.
While YouTube also had its own share of issues with questionable content over the last year, its efforts to codify new guidelines and aggressively police them is attracting more publishers to its offerings while Facebook is still changing its approach on a regular basis, as suggested by Mr. Mebus. A number of major media players including business mogul Rupert Murdoch are now also pushing for Google and Facebook to start paying publishers for the content they’re using to improve their user acquisition and engagement rates, though neither have any immediate plans to do so, as per their recent statements on the matter.