If you’re an indie musician, filmmaker, artist etc. it’s likely that you have a Facebook Page to promote your work or business. Over time, through hard work and conscientious social media marketing, you’ve built up quite a following. When you post updates to your page you expect that fans will see them right? Well, think again. Thanks to a change in their algorithm (and need to bolster revenues) Facebook has quietly altered the way their fan pages work. If you want all your fans (not just 20%) to see a post in their news feed, you’ll have to pay the privilege. A recent story in the New York Observer explains this new reality.
It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence,Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.
Usenet, a website that offers (paid) subscribers access to a variety of “news groups” has long seemed immune from DMCA takedown notices. Could that be changing?
Content creators and ISPs (internet service providers) have come to agreement on a voluntary “Copyright Alert System” to begin at month’s end.
The progressive series of alerts is designed to make consumers aware of activity that has occurred using their Internet accounts, educate them on how they can prevent such activity from happening again (for example, by securing home wireless networks or removing peer-to-peer software), and provide information about the growing number of ways to access digital content legally.
“Six Strikes” aside, the ISPs involved have made it clear that no user accounts will be terminated. Let’s hope the goal of educating the public and reducing piracy is met. More information on the new alert system can be found here.
A new kindle book by author Morris Rosenthal provides a how-to for those who find their work uploaded (illegally) online. The book “An Author’s Guide to Fighting Internet Copyright Infringements” He explains his motivation in writing the book on Amazon.com:
I’ve probably spent more time fighting copyright infringements than writing books over the last six years. In one case, I went as far as a two and a half year fight in Federal court. But the bulk of my time has been wasted sending DMCA notices to sites that take down one infringement only to put up another.
After years of frustration I had given up even trying, but when copyright infringements began appearing above my own pages in Google search following their 2011 Panda update, fighting infringements took on a new urgency.
I took a “look inside” and from what I read, it looks promising as a guide to navigating Google’s DMCA process and the web at large. You can purchase the book for a mere 99 cents on Amazon here.
Alan D. Mutter looks at the decline in newspaper ad revenues on his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur:
With the objective evidence suggesting that the newspaper business is living on borrowed time, publishers should be using their residual economic power, brand power and marketing power to develop new digital products to protect and sustain their valuable franchises. Or else.