Thursday, July 30, 2015

"The illusion of audience ownership is becoming harder to sustain"

TA:
Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.

...

2013 was the year every major site with a social strategy broke traffic records by a mile; 2014 was the year they looked around at everyone else’s sudden success and became slightly less confident touting their numbers, because they all hit them by doing and talking about very similar things; 2015, when a single weird or clever native Facebook video can easily out-traffic a week of a site’s web content, is the year it’s becoming clear to everyone who these audiences really belong to, and what it means to borrow them.