Complete Story
11/08/2017
What does Mark Zuckerberg really think of the value of news? Not all that much
As I was listening to mixed but mostly negative news last week about newspaper company financial results, Facebook was reporting another 49 percent surge in ad revenues and a quarterly profit of nearly $5 billion.
What caught my attention, though, when I later read a transcript of Facebook's earnings conference call was a Mark Zuckerberg comment on the relative value of personal social shares and news. In the course of answering an analyst's question about video engagement, the social network's co-founder and CEO said:
"Video is growing incredibly quickly, and that goes across both social content and more passive public consumption of content. And they create different dynamics in the system, and I think that's an important thing to understand.
"When your friend posts something and you get to engage with it, it might inform you and entertain you. But you also, if you interact with it, you're building a relationship with that person or you feel closer to that person, and that is a really important part of what social networking is supposed to do. Whereas when you engage with public content, you might get informed or be entertained, but it's not necessarily increasing social capital in the same way or building relationships between people."
I take public content to include news video and "social capital" to be the core value and end goal for Facebook use.
