This is Rhizome Today for Friday, October 31, 2014
Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at rhizome.org/today.
A normal house?
The pleasure of working in the low stakes non-profit world of internet publishing is that unlike, say, Gawker or BuzzFeed, we don't really need to sweat the stats. Still, we are human, and good traffic hits that pleasure center in our brains.
Like most daily update internet websites, the majority of our in-bound traffic comes from social media. Most of that social media traffic is from Facebook. They even give us compelling stats about this traffic! Every time we share something there, we're shown a number indicating how many users were delivered that piece of content, based on natural shares (x user saying "look at y") and their algorithm's delivery patterns.
A ghastly moan!
We've recently made some hay about social media, and our intention to archive some content on various sites. We even built a tool, Colloq. This tool was written up in the New York Times, and Facebook was asked for a comment. They declined.
Since then it's been quite a fright...
As seen above, we've seen our Facebook reach—and, via Chartbeat, its attendant in-bound traffic—decline. The dip began with our trip to London for #DoYouFollow, which, of course, confused the timing and delivery of our editorial. Fine. And yet, since then, with the intervening Colloq announcement, we've yet to recover. The selection for the Prix yesterday was particularly confusing—the shortlist reached 6x as many Facebook users. BOO!
So, on this Halloween day, I'd like to make a very spooky insinuation, but also say, we just could be paranoid about bumps in the night that are really only an old creaky house.
RIP
The social networks on which we as publishers, as people rely are more or less black boxes about which we can only speculate and against which we have little recourse. Are you afraid of the dark? I just might be.
