You guys may have heard the recent news that College Humor recently laid off most of their staff. This is tragic news and hopefully those people can find employment soon.
It’s not just College Humor, a lot comedy as well as other types of content that use Facebook as their primary platform are losing their livelihoods.
Here is an interesting article for more information: https://www.vulture.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy.html
The primary problem with Facebook is that as a platform, it forces you to spend money on advertising to increase exposure. I get around one view and five engagements per week regularly. Per week. On one Twitter post, I managed to get over a hundred impressions and three engagements.
As you can see above, you will receive so much spam from Facebook saying that if you spend a certain amount of money, you will reach a certain amount of people. This may be tempting for small content creators but remember that it will be extremely difficult to monetize traffic on Facebook. It will be extremely difficult to redirect traffic to an external source. Facebook is a black hole in that you need to keep paying money to increase exposure for content that needs to be posted directly on Facebook and will be consumed directly on Facebook as well. It will be hard to redirect that to anywhere or anything outside of Facebook.
On top of that, if anything in the Facebook algorithm changes, which it will, you will need to spend even more money to have traffic directed back to you. And endless cycle in which the only person that wins is Facebook.
Now I’m not saying that it is impossible to do well on Facebook, it’s just harder.
Focus on long term growth. Being tied down to one platform will mean that your success as a content creator and your revenue stream will depend on that platform continuing to exist and that conditions remain favorable to you, which it may not. Use all the platforms, including social media, to build up yourself as a brand so that no matter which platform you choose to call home, your audience can follow you wherever you go. If people know who you are, and you exist on multiple platforms and those people consume content from you from multiple platforms, one platform becoming untenable will not be such a big problem.
I know it’s hard being a small content creator. I’m in the same boat. But shortcuts never work. We need to settle in for the long haul and play the long game. Wishing you guys the best and much success.
Ducky Obrien 