Almost 1.3 billion people are logging on the Facebook every month. Facebook is increasing becoming a source for most news for the public. According to the New York Times Facebook is where are 30% of adults in the United States are getting their news from. The New York Times says that Facebook is the forefront of a fundamental change in how people consume journalism.
What social media like Facebook does is come up with a mathematical formula, which predicts what people might want to read. It is compared to how the music industry has changed to buying music online instead of the hard copy, which is the compact disk.
According to Facebook the goal is to identify what the people want to read, which is different all around the world. Facebook has started this trend in December of 2013. They wanted to highlight higher quality content. According to the New York Times Facebook executives frame the company’s relationship with publishers as mutually beneficial: when publishers promote their content on Facebook, its users have more engaging material to read, and the publishers get increased traffic driven to their sites. Numerous publications, including The New York Times, have met with Facebook officials to discuss how to improve their referral traffic.
The New York Times article specifically states that social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn want their users to spend more time, or do more, on their services, which is understandable. This is a concept known as engagement. Facebook officials say that the more time users spend at its site, the more likely there will be a robust exchange of diverse viewpoints and ideas shared online.