Site blames Facebook changes for their collapse

[hums005]

13 hours ago, porina said:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43225987

 

The site might not be one most of us have ever heard of, but it is the general situation that is interesting. 12 million Facebook followers is a huge number, but it seemed they were dependant on Facebook to drive their site. Algorithm changes to prioritise friend content over others reduced their exposure significantly, leaving them in an unsustainable situation.

 

For comparison, LinusTech has 600k Facebook followers, but the prime focus is Youtube where there are over 5.3M subscribers. Also LMG has 19 people listed on their website (Luke not included), well short of the 100 from Little Things.

 

I'd twist it around a bit, is it correct for them to blame Facebook, or alternatively did they fail to work out a backup plan? Recognising that Youtube is a very different site from Facebook, could they have maybe transferred some of those 12M followers onto Youtube? Maybe even find more subscribers who might not frequent Facebook, as I do know many who wont touch Facebook. Maybe it isn't a fair comparison, but they had a large number of staff relative to followers, compared to LMG. Did they over expand? If they kept going with smaller staff, could that have remained sustainable?

 

The other concern is, are there other sites, or Youtubers, who might be at risk of a similar situation? There are many who are heavily dependant on Youtube, and there is already the adpocapalypse in progress. Alternative income streams like Patreon are popular.

https://www.littlethings.com/goodbye-from-littlethings/?utm_medium=google

 

Dear Audience,

It is with great sadness that I write to you to say goodbye. Yesterday LittleThings shut down. We just went live for the very last time. I wanted to take a moment to thank you, the audience, before I sign off and pack up my desk.

As many of you may not know, LittleThings started as a viral blog off-shoot of a pet food e-commerce website. I was a former actress/artist and aspiring writer who spent most of her time furiously submitting articles and personal essays to every digital media site on the internet. I rarely got paid to write. My day job was as the social media manager for a pet food e-commerce site called PetFlow. Joe Speiser and Alex Zhardonovsky had built an engaged audience of over a million customers on their Facebook page, and I basically was being paid to entertain them.

Part of my job was writing the blog once per week, and usually we had a sponsored content to fill the post, so I rarely had the opportunity to actually write. One week, however, I had no sponsored content to write, and so I decided to take a stab at something different. ViralNova had just burst onto the scene, with their incredibly viral articles about snakes and spiders in ceilings. They were all over my Facebook News Feed. I decided to see if I could imitate the phenomenon of viral articles by writing a piece about cats that would entice our audience to read and share. A large portion of our audience owned cats and responded to my (brilliant) cat memes, so I write a PSA entitled “7 Things In Your Home That Could Kill Your Cat Right Now.” The thumbnail image was a very distressed looking kitten.

We had monitors hanging from pillars in the office. As soon as I posted the article, traffic on these monitors spiked. 1,000. 2,000. 5,000. 10,000.

…And then the site crashed because the servers couldn’t withstand the traffic. Joe came out of his office, and as I tried to apologize for crashing the site he asked me if I could do the same thing again tomorrow. I had no idea that this moment was the moment that would change the trajectory of my career.

This was the birth of the blog that would turn into LittleThings in 2014. It quickly became clear that while my pet danger PSAs had some serious viral traction, feel-good content was better received by you, our audience. Many of you were moms, so we started creating parenting content in addition to pet content. It continued to grow from there. When we officially spun off from PetFlow and into LittleThings, I remember talking to Alex about creating original video. Six months after we agreed that it would probably be too expensive to try, we had a tiny and functional studio producing hands-only food videos.

The growth was fast and furious. So fast, in fact, that I only occasionally realized that I was living in a dream where I could almost immediately breath life into ideas. Joe and Alex gave me the opportunity to oversee the creative and social team, and I quickly learned that the only way we were going to be successful was if I hired people who were experts in their own fields – and did I ever find a team of experts with amazing hearts. The content evolved because of the people who accepted the jobs I was lucky enough to offer. Every month, every minute, our creations improved. Initially, we only covered curated viral video. By 2017, LittleThings writers were creating original first-person articles with photography and video. Our hands-only food videos became full episodic cooking shows. I watched LittleThings Live turn into Refresh with a dedicated audience of Sugar Cubes. I never, ever imagined that I would be given this kind of gift.

My happiest moments were when I got to promote creatives from within.  The people who have been creating the content for you are some of the best and the brightest in the business. They genuinely care about the audience they’re creating content for. All of them. They’re fearless and hardworking. They’ve stayed at the office past midnight to hit deadlines. They’ve thought about creating things for you that I could not have dreamed up on my own. They’ve done a phenomenal job at leveraging Facebook to make very real connections with all of you.

In this goodbye letter, I want to tell you – the audience – how grateful I am for the past four years. Without LittleThings, I don’t know where I would be. The writing and work that I created before I came here were mostly about experiences I had in my life that were very dark. Very traumatic stuff. You, audience, taught me to be light again. You taught me that good news is infinitely shareable. That even in the darkest times there are glimmers of hope. That I can be a force for good in the world. My team taught me about how to be a good manager. They taught me about risk taking and about thinking outside of the box. They taught me, yesterday and today, that laughter is the best medicine.

For those of you who have been watching and reading our content, I will miss you. I’ll miss reading your comments and watching your reactions. Please stay in touch on twitter @Maiastar, or on Instagram @maiastarz. It has been an honor to entertain you.

They say that if you help just one person, you’ve succeeded. I wanted to share a clip from Refresh that’s very near and dear to my heart. Thank you, audience, for watching and sharing and loving the LittleThings.

To my beautiful, brilliant colleagues: You did this. You made a difference, and you will continue to do so.

 

Love Always,

 

Maia McCann

 

Their goodbye for their audience.

[MrDynamicMan]

3 hours ago, asus killer said:

it's not easy to grow a normal business in 3 years to a point of having 100 employees. That should be a sign this were not exactly sustainable growth.
What amazes me the most is that they don't even try to do their business in any other way, "oh well so facebook doesn't give us page views for free, best close shop and fire everyone".
100 people can't came up with a alternative plan to at least try? This is laughable, i'm sorry but it is. Companies with this mentality should not even exist. My take is that they know their content is shit and were only living of click bait.

I also kind of doubt the "100 people" claim. I mean, its not difficult to trawl the internet and find cool articles and lifetips and re-has them, even with 12 million subs. I'd put it at a team of 40, max.

[porina]

4 minutes ago, MrDynamicMan said:

I also kind of doubt the "100 people" claim. I mean, its not difficult to trawl the internet and find cool articles and lifetips and re-has them, even with 12 million subs. I'd put it at a team of 40, max.

They may not all be full time positions, but we don't have that info.

[MrDynamicMan]

1 minute ago, porina said:

They may not all be full time positions, but we don't have that info.

yeah, like 25 full time employees, the garbage man, the security firm, some dudes kid who once came in for bring your kid to work day kinda thing. They could easily inflate those numbers to play the sympathy card, or they could have a very different business model where you need 100 people to run a clickbait site... somehow.

[Misanthrope]

Well yes that happens. It will happen to many youtubers as well (As I'm sure you've been told, non-fucking-stop for a while now since youtubers being more composed of blown up amateurs and not career people they come off as far more entitled and demanding)

 

My answer to this is the following: tough shit.

 

Seriously though there's so many businesses that simply wouldn't exist or could have never reached their success level without social media. You're basically setting up your business model at the feet of the bigger fish called Facebook. Sorry but those are the breaks: don't build sand castles if you're not prepared to have them destroyed at a moment's notice.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

18 hours ago, porina said:

I'd twist it around a bit, is it correct for them to blame Facebook, or alternatively did they fail to work out a backup plan?.

Easy come, easy go. I'm not going to berate what they were doing as I haven't even looked at it, but the way it's told in OP's source it sounds like it was Facebook algorithm that made them big, and therefore it's changes in the Facebook algorithm that sunk them.

 

3 hours ago, MrDynamicMan said:

I also kind of doubt the "100 people" claim. I mean, its not difficult to trawl the internet and find cool articles and lifetips and re-has them, even with 12 million subs. I'd put it at a team of 40, max.

You forget all the Coltons: making videos and articles is fun, but at the end of the day they were in the advertisement business so you need to add the sales force too. I've known editing companies where the content team was smaller than than the sales team...

[Commodus]

This underscores a golden rule: never make your success heavily dependent on someone else's business model.

 

The classic example for me is Flash.  I remember 2009/2010, when companies like Google, BlackBerry and Palm were eager to enslave themselves to Flash.  It would solve everything!  And of course, Apple was the Great Satan for refusing Flash in favor of an actual universal standard (HTML5).  Only... Flash sucked.  Those companies that chained themselves to it ended up suffering, while Apple didn't have a problem.

 

It's a similar issue here: sites like LittleThings are not only reliant on social network referrals for success, they're so reliant that the slightest change to the social site's business model causes problems.  I know it's difficult to build a big, independent site without lots of cash, but heavy dependence like this should be seen as a problem even when it works.  Do you depend heavily on Facebook for traffic?  Find out how you can boost your audience from Twitter and Google search results, and treat it like it's a crisis.

[Guest The Viking]

Good for them. After reading their goodbye letter, they should just be ashamed of themselves: https://www.littlethings.com/goodbye-from-littlethings/?utm_medium=google

 

What's with their level of english? Or at least the level of this person?

 

Quote

 I was a former actress/artist and aspiring writer who spent most of her time furiously submitting articles and personal essays to every digital media site on the internet. I rarely got paid to write.

 

No wonder, with how poor your writing and language skills are. So, next one going down the drain is Buzzfeed?

[chilicheeseburger]

How would it be Facebook's fault? Not a big fan of Facebook but they can change their algorithm to whatever they want, when they want.

 

Little Things is to blame since they ran their business in a way that entirely depends on an algorithm they have no control about whatsoever.

It's like a store only selling rain coats and hoping the sun never comes out.

[Canada EH]

cowardice blaming facebook when its their own fault

they gotta be able to switch it up and move with the changes

[SansVarnic]

Facebook s not responsible for poor business planning. Never really on one source ... never.

[bob345]

No sympathy at all for these guys. If you build your company around someone elses platform with no other redundant business plans you are doomed to fail from the start. 

[Mooshi]

Trusting Facebook is like trusting Jared Fogle to babysit.

[yian88]

To begin with FB should NOT allow any sort of business to make a facebook page it should only be allowed for persons. Any company doing that should be banned instantly without apeal.

But money ayyy $