“The Internet’s Ultimate Content Cannibal”

That’s how Marcus Wohlsen imagines the Facebook of the future, in light of David Carr’s revelations about the company’s recent overtures to publishers. Carr elaborates:

The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.

That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.

I, for one, welcome our new Internet overlords. (Just kidding). Wohlsen looks at the big picture:

Publishers likely will balk at ceding so much control to Facebook. But in the end, they may not have much choice. The arrangement might sound like a partnership at first, but it could end up like Amazon and the book industry. Book publishers may hate dealing with Amazon and resent its influence over their sales. But the last thing they would do is pull their books from Amazon. Thanks to its outsized leverage, Facebook’s ability to dictate terms to online publishers could wind up much the same.

Robert Montenegro considers the implications:

Now that Facebook has mastered mobile ad revenue while other sites have struggled, there may soon come a time where much of the content you access via Facebook will all be hosted on Facebook. We’re already seeing Mark Zuckerberg’s push to include more content within the site itself. The relatively new trending topics feature is an example, as well as how the mythical algorithm favors on-site content such as Facebook-hosted videos over those hosted by competitors such as YouTube, which is owned by Google. If only a few popular sites decide to give in to Facebook’s offer, Zuckerberg could ignite a major ad revenue war.