In 2014, Joe Spieser launched LittleThings.com, a website focused on entertaining women with animal videos, recipes, and fun stories. The founder said his company had to be dissolved because Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018.
Before Facebook’s algorithm change, Joe’s website was working great with 20 million followers on the social network, mainly from Facebook’s huge user base. Speiser said at an annual conference, Facebook even used LittleThings as a model for how to build a successful media company.
But traffic to the company’s page took a massive hit when Facebook changed its algorithm to promote the posts it thinks people will engage with the most, like statuses from friends and family, by This way, Facebook hopes to retain users longer. However, Facebook also started promoting violent, false, and divisive content.
Speiser tweeted that CEO Mark Zuckerberg “didn’t like the content we were producing and he wanted more serious stuff.”
Speiser said this change caused the website to lose 90% of its organic traffic on Facebook. The huge loss of readers forced Speiser to lay off more than 100 employees, and the former CEO said he had lost $100 million. The LittleThings Company closed in 2018.
“It’s a death sentence,” I said.
Spieser is currently an “Angel Investor” who advises startup founders that while building a business based on apps like Amazon, TikTok, Google, Spotify and Instagram can be costly. can get you millions of people to know and grow fast, but he asked the question is “Do you really sleep well knowing that it can all be taken away at any time with a simple algorithm change?”
Speiser added that this made him feel “cold spine” and said the main social networks are “a sharp double-edged sword” for companies that build on them.
This algorithmic change caused intense controversy. Publishers argue that it forces them to reorient their business model to reach the social media platform’s readers, who are more inclined to click and engage with sensational and divisive content other types of news. As a result, so-called clickbait content has become more common.
Some internal documents show that even Facebook employees are concerned that the algorithm will have negative effects. Facebook’s parent company, now known as Meta, denied the report from the documents.
Reference: BINH