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Facebook's False Promise To Publishers

For online video publishers, Facebook and its newfangled sharing tools offered the promise of increased reach and promotion. As new data reveals, however, their expectations might have been overblown. “When Facebook made it easy to share what videos you were watching, companies like Socialcam, Metacafe, DailyMotion and Viddy rocketed up the app-charts and saw a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps,” writes GigaOm’s Om Malik. “Of course, with this friction-less sharing actions came howls of complaints from Facebook’s users.”

In turn, new AppData.com statistics show a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services. Viddy, for example -- which earlier this year latched onto Facebook’s Open Graph to post videos to people’s timelines -- has fallen off the top of the iOS charts, and is now down to #48 on the iTunes store.

Socialcam is still flying high at relatively #2 spot, yet, as Malik notes: “Socialcam … is now going to have to find new and novel ways to share … The company made some changes today that are less spammy and address many of the issues I had brought up in my post yesterday.”

1 comment about "Facebook's False Promise To Publishers".
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  1. Chuck Lantz from 2007ac.com, 2017ac.com network, May 16, 2012 at 6:25 p.m.

    There seem to be a few paragraphs missing from this article, specifically the ones that explain how Viddy and others went from seeing " ... a sharp increase in the usage and downloads of these apps" to " ... a sharp decline in the number of daily active users of these services."

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