Remember the time (actually only last April) when Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook Live and paid 140 or so media companies around the world some $50m to provide video coverage that made Live live. Ah! welcome to the surging, dominant video age. Except that now the major news analytics player, parse.ly, has just concluded that audiences spent 30% less time engaging with online video, on average, then they did with short, medium and lengthy text posts. And engagement, of course, is supposedly the crucial thing, the gold standard measure of involvement and commitment.
Facebook (the Poynter Institute reports) isn’t renewing those media contracts. Facebook is thinking more about “longer premium video content”. And so the wheel turns again: continuing proof that, digitally, last year’s amazing breakthrough can be this year’s febrile bust.
