Most publishers strive to maintain a presence on social media, with the expectation that it will increase traffic to their websites, and therefore increase revenue. In addition to paying for social media managers, they also often encourage their writers to post regularly on their own personal accounts (meaning reporters are spending time marketing instead of reporting). There is little evidence this actually increases revenue beyond the cost of supporting that presence (if that).

In addition to the financial (and probably opportunity) costs of social media, news and magazine publishers give up control of the public debate over their stories to the social networks. Since most of the debate about their stories happens on individual accounts, the publishers just become characters in the newly formed stories – the ones told in the threads of accounts owned by individuals, who can (and do) use them to distort and misrepresent what was reported by the publisher. And when reactions to a story go viral (for any reason) on social networks, it is the networks that get more revenue from the activity, not the publishers.

Publishers obviously want to attract a larger audience to their websites than just their subscribers, and social networks can bring random, transient visitors to their sites. But they rarely will subscribe when they land on a paywalled article that was mentioned on a social post. They probably won't even stay long enough for an auto-played video to run long enough to show an ad. It ends up being just another expense for the publisher, with no revenue to show for it. Instead of broadening their reach on social networks, publishers attract revenue-generating users for social networks.

Social networks are also not effective distribution channels for news. There are no barriers to distorting, misrepresenting, or amplifying news on social media. Quoted posts lose context and nuance, and chains of one- or two-sentence “summaries” can bear little resemblance to the source article. A key characteristic of social media is brevity, which is a root cause of miscommunication. They are good for notifying people there is news worth knowing, but not for getting the whole story.

Notd is a Publishing Network

Like social networks, a publishing network lets anyone publish for free. However, while social networks are designed to maximize interaction between all users, a publishing network (like notd.io) focuses on connecting publishers to readers. Users can subscribe to publisher's streams (like a section of their website), but their interaction with posts in a stream is limited to commenting. Before social networks, publishers (some of them) engaged their readers with comment sections. Some publishers abandoned reader comments, and others just shifted them to their social media accounts, giving readers less reason to visit the news site. Keep in mind that when we say “publishers”, we mean anyone who has something to tell the world.

Notd was created to help news publishers expand their audience (with revenue), but we also made it easy for anyone to be a publisher. You can read more about it at https://notd.io/n/NotdForNewsPublishers