"Dumb? The dumbest."
I am not a good businessman (hello BeachGrit!) and am genuinely confused by the machinations of the corporate world. Like, I remember driving through downtown Los Angeles as a younger man, looking up at all the tall buildings and wondering what all those workers were doing. Thousands upon thousands of workers punching on their computers and reporting to various vice-presidents but what were the workers punching and why so many of them and how did anything get done?
My mind couldn’t, and still can’t, fathom organizational hierarchy charts etc. but over the years I’ve picked up some tenants that appear to make businesses hum and one of the most important seems to be obfuscation. Just blurring the heck out of basic truths. Spin etc.
Well, our World Surf League has done a wonderful job of a muddled messaging from its very inception (hello Herr Paul Speaker!) and continues to throw pointless smoke. The failed Facebook rollout is prime example and, again I’m not a businessman, but what if instead of stretching the truth (hello “concurrent viewing numbers!) the League just came clean and explained how/why it didn’t work in plain language to its most ardent fans?
Would a little straight talk not cheer you up?
Thankfully, there are wonderful people in similar fields and here we have the great friend to explain, in plain language, our future. And without further ado:
The team I work for were very early adopters of this technology and did a deal with Facebook and a streaming video company (Facebook does not have the capability to live stream multi cam broadcast) to deliver weekly content in early 2016.
What we have found from doing the stream for 3 years is that despite Facebook claiming they do not “quash” or “algo” live video content, they do exactly that by preventing the video from appearing in your news feed.
This means that your streams only go out to a fraction of your audience.
In our case, we might get 200 live views reaching a total of 8,000 viewers, similar ratios to what the WSL gets for events so tells me they are on the same set up. It is worth pointing out there is NO regional coding. This is great except that we have 200,000 likes, so the engagement is less than 10% of the customer base and the only way to increase this is to pay money to Facebook. When we remind them that we did a deal with them their claim is that the “natural” setting of live video cannot be altered without a specific boost campaign.
This means that any live stream, unless boosted after the fact, (which isn’t strictly live event anymore) only ever goes out to a fraction of your engaged audience. So what the WSL have done is sign up to a service which actively prevents its customers from viewing the product.
Dumb? The dumbest. And they are only finding this out now because the numbers are way lower than what they would have predicted.
Choo-choo! Make way for the straight talk express!
In 2009 I had the displeasure of attending a sdg&e presser regarding the 2007 sd wildfires. their spokesperson was masterful in pointing the blame at everyone except themselves. I left feeling like I was the one who caused the fires.
The overall problem is – how can you really attract new sponsors and partners, when there is actually only max 20k people watching globally ( 2K for women)? You cant!!! Unless you change the whole package
Funny, the padang cup had more viewers than the womens jbay final, unsurprisingly though.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Sock it to’em Goaty!
Wow your friend sounds incredible smart! And handsome!
Well hang on.
The WSL is not at all in the same boat as Chas’s mate here. It has a significant deal with FB, involving FB’s investment of millions of dollars. FB is investing even more money with other sports to get those sports’ broadcasting rights too. They just missed a deal with the English Premier League for instance (they offered over $600 million and the EPL deemed it lowball).
FB had also carried WSL events live for the whole year beforehand (2017), clearly testing the thing out for value etc. The WSL news feed was straightforward enough through that year, you could watch it same as you could watch the stream on the WSL site.
How could it possibly be in their interests to prevent people from watching it now?
Like you can understand why FB would try to tax-for-clicks businesses in which it didn’t have an investment, but taxing your own investment?
I haven’t had time to dig around in this yet but I bet the JBay farce was more technical fuckup than anything.
Yeah — different arrangement then simply trying to use FB to distribute your content and payin’ a fee to do that.
Innerested in what answers you’d find out.
He’ll find an onion farmer.
well I’ll probably find a whole lot of bs, and one or two nuggets of information from unexpected sources. But fuck! I’ve got a lot on and I guess I am not that curious about it yet. This thing is gonna play out over years; the WSL is not gonna fall over next week or even next year, unless something spectacularly global happens to disrupt its financial base. Which is significantly bigger than most of us have assumed to this point.
I am the mate. I carried out a deal with a major Australian sporting organisation (due to commercial restrictions I cannot who but they are) to produce live video content with facebook as the major platform. Facebook were involved in the roll out.
Can I ask, did the organisation have a financial partnership with FB the way WSL has, ie a deal for exclusive broadcasting in return for cash?
Kind of but not quite exclusive. Actually, not exclusive at all.
There’s a lot of wriggle room there on the part of the WSL and other broadcast partners, which makes one think FB also has “room to move” in the deal.
inneresting.
Oh all these modern “exclusive” deals are only “exclusive” in some ways, not in all. It’s all compartmentalised. Like the latest sports broadcasting honeypot is FB, Google, Amazon etc etc all of whom are hurling apparently huge sums at sports so they can stream them in order to get some sort of edge on Netflix etc, which isn’t interested in sports. But their “exclusive” is just a streaming “exclusive”, like the EPL was still gonna go on broadcasting across a whole lot of other platforms. They really want your smartphones. But what cunt watches surfing on a smartphone. Not too many apparently.
Fuck I’m a cunt, then.
Apologies to Jen See if my choice words are offensive……
You fucken cunt!
Not specifically.
They had an arrangement that the feeds would be used to promote the (then new) livestream platform as this was the first top tier sporting organisation to jump on board (we also negotiated with Twitter and Pandora before going with facebook).
When the feeds went out with a low viewing number to member number ratio it was explained that the “natural” profile of live video was that it only went out to a fraction of your like base and that it did not appear in everyones news feed- and the only way to get it out to everyone was to boost it after that fact.
I am sure that what you are saying is correct in that as there is a financial agreement with the WSL and FB that includes elements like exclusivity and that theoretically should mean facebook nueters its own algo but the stinger is that the ratios are the same.
ha ha yes it is interesting. Maybe some of it explained by people watching on cable, maybe some by it being in JBay and thus outside some time zones, maybe also some by people being blocked from socials at work where otherwise they’d be watching, but…maybe also some by the slightly bogus nature of FB “likes” in the first place.
“Taxing your own investment”
Depends on how you look at it.
A bank lending you money charges for it, right ?
fb wants content coz that secures viewers for ads.
They are also very cynical once they have secured content.
fb might well view this investment as a loan.
Nick Carrol – investigative surf journalist
Chas smith – surf journalist
It cost about $1/100 people if your boosting with a highly targeted audience. FB has actively destroyed FB business page engagement for the past 6 algorithm cycles. Whoever was on the WSL social media team should have absolutely known this in advance.
Pro surfing had to die somewhere. Is facebook sort of like hospice care? Anyone seen the odds for a KS win in Tahiti?
Pro Surfing RIP!
Think the veiwers have had it.
We saw it coming when quikbong was taken over by banks…you really think this management gives a fuk about Surfing?
After this debacle of a negotiation, not handing in permits on time for the Hawaiian events, and the deal with Hurley to be a “background sponsor” for 4 events, effectively giving a prospective “main sponsor” no incentive whatsoever to commit to sponsoring an event, how is Sophie not fired? Honestly? Do they not have attorneys? These are catastrophic blunders, time and time again, that only hurt the WSL on exposure, “growth”, but more importantly their bottom line. I’m sure I am missing some other failed deals too. Absolute idiots.
They should hire Donald “art of the deal” Trump
Sophia not fired…. check out her last name! Da. Chosen one my ass.
I like Beachgrit. I liked the look of those ear buds you had advertised on here. Where can I buy them?
I am lost, can someone who knows facebook unpack this for me:
“What we have found from doing the stream for 3 years is that despite Facebook claiming they do not “quash” or “algo” live video content, they do exactly that by preventing the video from appearing in your news feed.”
What’s the “news feed” and is it something different from the rest of facebook? Why does this alter the numbers?
Straight talk express, full steam ahead!
Terrible!
Facebook gave the WSL Expectile Dysfunction.
Yea – and queen of kooks, Backward Beth should have known this.
Ya know, being the Purveyor of Cool and Redundant Deals n all.
Nice hire, Soph !
Amongst many other atrocities, Facecrack ‘shares’ aids and herpes.
Yeah — this is how it works for publishers with non-live content, too. I was for a time, logged on as an admin for a large magazine’s FB page. There was a constant stream of asks for money to reach more users. In that case, the numbers were in the $5k range or so, if I’m remembering right. I was slightly irritated by this situation, because it meant the publisher was payin’ FB more for incremental distribution than I received for the original content. So fuck capitalism, I guess!
It’s the digital advertising model that sucks.
The bit that really fucks me off is goog n fb ruling advertising and clogging the net with their ads. It’s stupid and in hindsight should never have been allowed to occur.
We as consumers pay for our access and these cuntards shove as much content down the pipe as they can induce admins to put on their pages.
So we get truly ugly page layouts with a ton of off-site ads from god knows how many servers causing browser incompatibility and random glitches.
Our beloved BG is a good example. Ugly.
Yeah, I can barely fuck with this site on desktop. Mobile cuts to the chase, but BG is pretty terrible to navigate with the ads.
Use Brave Browser.
Hopefully the ad industry will shift towards something like BAT. They should pay us to consume ads.
I use it on the personal machine, but I can’t on the work one.
As we’re all highlighting, dudes shouldn’t have to use workarounds to functionally use a page. Industry will have to shift. Maybe after the next recession-related digital shakeup.
What? You’re saying I should miss out on a Liberal National Party (Australian equivalent of the Republican Party) ads for a candidate found to be lying about his army service to appear more ‘staunch’.
Sometimes, the ads are more anti-depressing than the stories.
What? I get “This new lizardface-decoration app is blowing up in (insert town I’ve never heard of)”.
Hmm, I use Chrome for it and it’s not terrible, really. I mean, no worse than most!
BG takes exponentially longer to load than any other site I use, including video-heavy surf & fishing forecasting sites with way more data on every page, err, porn.
Yeah, yeah, it’s not great. I think the cache thingy on Chrome speeds it up some, maybe.
We wouldnt have to deal with ads if we paid for access to the sites we visited. This shit doesnt pay for itself. Right Chas? I bet the grit would fly like a well oiled machine and have a beautiful easy to navigate layout with superior content if we all chipped in $10/month
We’ll never do that though because fuck paying for journalism, let alone bullshit surf gossip.
Amirite?
yep.
So true!
Ha ha fuck.
Well, it’s a great model if your one of the Bigs or an ISP. But for people who make words, photos, videos and for independent publishers it sucks ass. Completely.
Just how large
was aforementioned magazine? A3? A1? lols!
Facefuck™️ Is a waste of MySpace and hence I continue not to be a part of it.
Imagine a concerted effort with Facebook and aforementioned streaming service to deliberately throttle numbers lower on partner companies content as leverage for this “more money = more exposure” ruse? Teams assessing said partner companies and how far they can push it and at what cost. Full on economic hit man style.
Damn, bro. What would their specific boost campaign for Teahupoo look like? Besides paying more money, I imagine plastering this all over to get them target audience views… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
P.S. I’m aware not any part of this comment makes sense.
Heh, I think the extremely busy, bright and shiny people at WSL have finally figured out how the scam of fb works.
You gotta pay to get your numbers.
Want even more numbers ? Pay some more.
Lambs to the Slaughter.
It’s the same thing with OKCupid. Pay to boost forced profile views. Maybe they should live stream through dating sites if they want to appeal to youth instead of grannies on Facebook.
Ok Cupid, cool ya jets and swipe right already.
Ain’t nobody tryin’ to fuck to a WSL broadcast. Puts my dick to sleep as it is, much less on an app designed to casually knock boots.
“Alexa, call ‘Dirk Ziff'” … “ALEXA, CALL ‘DIRK ZIFF’!!!” ..
“Hey D, Mark says just a few more million and the webcast will be huge!”
Facebook exclusive broadcast negotiations:
Dirk Dirka Dirka Mo Dolla You Haaav! Dirka Dirka Jihad! Sherpa Sherpa So Dirka Dirka Infidel or Jihad?!? https://youtu.be/9OwFeYlY9GU
Respect. You are now the Hunter S Thompson of Gonzo Commenting.