On Facebook's Nuclear Bomb

With a tweak of code, the company upends an industry

On Thursday night, Mark Zuckerberg dropped the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the media industry.

In a post, Facebook’s CEO said that its 2 billion users will “see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard.”

The implications for this are massive, especially for brands and publishers that have perhaps put too many eggs in the Facebook basket. For a long time, it wasn’t a bad strategy, as Facebook generated incredible amounts of traffic—but Zuckerberg’s announcement changes that.

According to Katherine Hays—CEO of startup Vivoom, which powers user-generated campaigns—Facebook’s newsfeed overhaul spells trouble not only for publishers and traffic, but also for brands, which stand to lose the audiences they worked (and paid) to build up themselves.

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