It’s no secret that Facebook and Google are in a constant internet land-grab contest. Each of these companies have hired as many brilliant minds as they can, in order to compete against each other. Ever since Google launched Google+, Facebook has been firing back, and hitting their target where it hurts.
Facebook has landed some deadly blows to it’s opponents in the recent past. Shortly after Meerkat and Periscope launched, Facebook released it’s Facebook Live function with live video feeds. Almost overnight, this delivered a major KO to Periscope, Meerkat and Blab. I couldn’t tell you when the last time heard either of those three networks mentioned.
Google is no secret to game ending KOs either. When Google arrived on the scene, the took on the internet giants and won. They beat Yahoo, Bing, Ask Jeeves and anyone else who stepped in the ring with them. They’ve remained the reigning champion for decades now.
The fact that these two internet heavyweights are battling is out is amazing to me. It’s like watching the ultimate slugfest between boxers who are clearly using performance enhancing drugs. Just two roid raging internet companies trying to kill each other. Now that’s my kind of excitement!
In 2016, Facebook has hit Google with one helluva one-two combo.
The first punch came in the form of video. Facebook beefed up it’s newsfeed positioning for videos. This took away billions of views from YouTube (owned by Google) and was a major blow, and changed how YouTube pays their content creators. Since the same videos that were on YT were now on FB, with out ads on them, more people watched on FB. No ad dollars were paid out by FB. Advantage = Facebook
The second punch came within the last 60 days or so. Facebook released “instant articles” in which they indexed/cached billions of webpages by encouraging site owners to instal a java script code. It worked! Now, thanks to that little java code, FB can run ads on any website without paying the owner!
Think about it, Google has Adsense, which is the ad network that pays site owners for letting them run ads on their websites. Facebook is running ads on the same websites, eliminating Google’s Adsense ads and not having to pay the site owner for shit! Brilliant! Advantage = Facebook
Ol’ Zuck did not come to play on this one. He came to win. Matter of fact, because of this latest “instant article” induction, we are all gonna win. Here’s why:
A couple weeks ago Facebook announced that they will be giving more weight to personal profile posts and we should see less ads in the newsfeed and more posts from our friends. This is great for those of us with engaging personal profiles.
Here’s why the newsfeed change is taking place
With the expansion of the audience network via instant articles, Facebook can now run more ads on the audience network and less ads in the newsfeed. This allows them to spread the ads out in a way that isn’t too much for the user to handle. Less ads in the newsfeed and more ads on instant article sites.
This also means that if you have a site with instant articles installed on it, your site will get more newsfeed time too! Only catch is, that when they click on your site to read your stuff, your competitor’s ad might be there. Google has been that way for years, so it’s nothing new in internetland.
Will Google survive the deadly one-two combination Facebook has thrown at them so far in 2016? Only time will tell. All we can do in the meantime is use information and changes like these, to our advantage. That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna write more articles and make sure my ads on running on the audience network. I you’d like to know more about marketing and running ads on Facebook, as well as other social media networks, click the Phone Funnels banner below to learn about the future of social media sales.
