The steady decline of ad sales is killing the news industry. Facebook offers a way out, but but only if newsrooms take it as an opportunity to rethink what business they are in. 

The push for news organizations to put their stories on Facebook seems, at best, like a bargain with the devil: Give us your content, Mark Zuckerberg barters, and we’ll give you an audience — and a cut of the advertising.

It doesn’t take much poking to make that offer look bad: Sure, news organizations will get more readers, but readers with little loyalty and no direct relationship to the publisher. They will be served advertising with a host of its own problems, not the least of which is that it just doesn’t make that much money, except at the scale of a site like BuzzFeed or the New York Times — which happen to be the two reported early adopters.

It’s a textbook example of a company working to commodify its complements: People come to Facebook, in part, for news, and now Facebook is making stories more interchangeable. This could make Facebook more profitable and put it in a stronger position when it comes to negotiating terms with news organizations.

For an idea of how well commodifying complements works out in the long term, compare how well Microsoft did versus Gateway and Dell. By having Windows run on a variety of third-party manufacturers, which were left to compete primarily on hardware price, PC prices were driven down while Windows adoption surged. Ultimately, Dell had to be taken private while Gateway shut down all of its retail stores before being acquired by a competitor.

Facebook doesn't care about you. It doesn't care about your business. It doesn't care about the internet. It only cares about Facebook.

— dan sinker (@dansinker) March 24, 2015

But what alternative do news organizations have? Few people notice ads and even fewer click them. Banding together in a competing consortium seems like a good idea, until you start comparing the investment in technology and sales that Google, Facebook, and Twitter can make versus race-to-the-bottom, programmatic advertising sales such as The Pangaea Alliance – including Reuters, CNN, The Guardian and others – seems to be chasing.

Which makes now as good a time as ever for news organizations to take a long hard look in the mirror and realize that they need to get out of a fast-commodifying online advertising business and into one that will grow with them for years to come.

Facebook’s bargain, if approached the right way, offers as good a chance as any to make that happen.

Play the ecosystem

Every time a news organization’s work is aggregated, the original’s value lessens as there is now a copy. And for work with wide appeal, likely thousands or tens of thousands of rewrites, each made at a lesser cost than the original, but often better optimized to go viral. 

Unfortunately, the most important and expensive work, such as exposés and investigations, is the most devalued by aggregation. So news organizations, driven by a growth imperative, turn to more deeply sensational, decontextualized, and social rewrites in an effort to gain audience. 

But rather than playing the game, savvy media operators are becoming the game master, as beautifully chronicled by John Herrman for The Awl:

Each week, the ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ industry observes a sacred ritual: Together, but not quite in sync, dozens of websites embed and then post the longest segment from John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight. This video is made available by HBO shortly after the show airs — this week’s, about the sugar industry, is timestamped October 26th.

That John Oliver’s weekly video(s) will go viral is, at this time, a given. Whether or not the posts that embed those videos will go viral is another matter altogether. Each time around there are winners, losers, and mere participants.

The real winner, of course, is John Oliver and HBO, which get free promotion throughout some of the web’s most trafficked sites while also netting ad revenue from the YouTube embeds, and it does that without destroying its own brand with undifferentiated content.

Turning threats into opportunities

And this is where Facebook’s hosting of content can pay off. The economics of online advertising are bad and getting worse for publishers, but if properly executed, these kinds of partnerships can be used as a form of native advertising for news organizations — but instead of paying for promotion, the news partners get paid to promote their own work.

It does require also developing new revenue streams that aren’t advertising. Perhaps a conference business, like Recode runs. Perhaps it’s live performances of news, which This American Life, Radio Ambulante, and PopUp Magazine have popularized. Or better yet, something completely original to your audience, organization, and community.

For MuckRock, the company I co-founded five years ago, our answer was to build great tools for getting government information, and then offering those tools to the world.

It’s helped us break important stories, ranging from an in-depth look at police militarization to a sweeping look at prison privatization, and more than 500 other stories over the past five years (we’re now publishing daily with a staff of four).

And our revenue — both absolute and per thousand page views — has continued to grow. A few months ago, without advertising, we were making over $15 for every thousand visitors. As a comparison, here is the kind of advertising we would have to put on each and every page to make the same amount of money with the same audience:

Instead, our site has no advertising, which has given us amazing design flexibility and allows us to put our audience’s interests first, avoiding the shady world of advertising trackers while being one of the first news organizations to adopt HTTPS, the secure data transfer protocol, in 2011.

And for us, if ad rates are pushed lower from increasing competition, we can actually benefit as we advertise our own offerings at a better return on investment.

A media world less reliant on advertising can be hard to imagine for many, but not for all. In fact, as The Economist’s Tom Standage recently noted, 41% of millennials already use ad-blocking software. His organization is already planning for a future without it. The question is, will your news organization be ready for that future?

Facebook is truly offering a deal with the devil — but that doesn’t mean news organizations can’t use it as an escape clause.