Facebook’s Experimental Newsfeed
Facebook has recently released an experiment in Sri Lanka, Slovakia, and Serbia which puts posts from pages in a separate feed. This means the original news feed only contains advertisements and posts from friends. Many Facebook pages have seen huge drops – upwards of 50% – in user engagement following the change. While this has drastic effects on pages like BuzzFeed and Tasty, Facebook intends on keeping advertisements in the main newsfeed so they won’t be losing out. This also creates more incentive for pages to buy advertisement slots to obtain the same amount of outreach.
This relates to our analysis of hubs and authorities in class for PageRank. By putting posts from pages in a separate news feed, Facebook is effectively making it a little more difficult to access such links to those pages. However, even a little change in accessibility can have big effects on the outreach of these pages. This is similar to a web search model except for the pages only accessible through Facebook itself. As Facebook ‘destroys links’ to certain web pages, those web pages have much less value.