Is DcSoundOp off Facebook?

Just a quick post to confirm that the DcSoundOp Facebook page was indeed unpublished this week on purpose. It has been a while coming & this week seemed like a good time to make the change. This isn’t in response to any one event or issue, it just felt like the right time to make a move. What’s wrong with the Facebook though?

Why Facebook?

Frankly, Facebook’s whole vibe has never worked for video very well. Their video quality is unusually bad by modern standards, downsizing everything to 720p no matter how good the upload. They really prefer video to be uploaded directly to their platform, which does make sense. And, they don’t really like sharing links to outside services like YouTube, though that’s pretty understandable too. Additionally, it has so-far not been possible to monetize views on their platform as a creator. They do happily serve paid ads on those videos to viewers though…

This is something they are expected to change in the near future, and that’s commendable. However, their new monetization scheme, intended to attract content creators to the platform, has roughly 1/30th the budget that YouTube paid out to creators last year. Overall it feels like a weak attempt to recover a platform they’ve let slip away. Why should creators ever come back to a platform that doesn’t serve their content to their own followers? They’ve already got YouTube covering that pretty well.

Silicon Valley Shakedown

Something feels wrong. That’s the best way to explain our experience as a creator on Facebook. Constant pressure to promote or boost content, while channel followers often never see your posts. It’s a ridiculous business model they’re trying to peddle. It must bring in a tidy profit if you’re dealing in propaganda, but for content creators, it’s a joke.

Say you start a page & build an audience (DcSoundOp grew to only 1500 Followers on Fb). Next you make a post sharing your latest video. Surprisingly, it only gets shown to ~10% of your audience. (DcSoundOp posts are usually seen by just 100-200 ppl). But then you start to get messages & notifications from Facebook. They’re super excited to let you know how many people could see your post, if you just pay up.

They offer to boost or promote the post to new people with similar interests. The more you cough up, the more of these folks might potentially join your audience. If they do join though, they’ll become part of the 90% of your followers who will likely never see your posts in their feed organically again.

It’s frustrating & makes building an audience on the platform worth very little. Facebook has made it extremely clear who controls what those folks will ever see from you & they’re bringing in ad revenues close to $100 Billion a year for the trouble. There is no future on that type of platform for DcSoundOp, so we’re out.

This hasn’t been the case with Instagram so much, at the smaller level anyway. Instagram has been a really good platform to use over the years without much drama. Despite being a Facebook product, there is little soliciting of ads to small creators & stories at least seem to get shown to your followers by default. We’ll keep using Instagram until that changes, which might not be too long.

Additionally, the Community area on YouTube has been a lot of fun to use lately for similar posts. Look out for more posts there in the future and here on this site.

That’s all for now.