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GetGlue. (AP)
Facebook used to be a “time suck” — now it just sucks.
That’s the view of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who is urging marketers to take their business elsewhere after the social network started charging the tech billionaire to send messages to all the team’s fans.
“In the past we put FB first, Twitter second,” Cuban wrote in a roughly 1,700-word blog post calling out the social network. “FB has been moved to the bottom of a longer list.”
He added: “FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that its best purpose in life is as a huge time suck.”
At issue is Facebook’s filtering of posts that appear in users’ news feeds. The site says it is trying to present users with content that they have shown an interest in while cutting down on spam.
But Cuban says it is a pay-to-play move. He argues that Facebook is making it harder for marketers to reach their fans without paying for so-called “promoted posts.”
And making the site more targeted and efficient is actually a mistake, according to Cuban. He claims most people go to the site because it’s a “time suck” that they enjoy.
Facebook, however, said it gets plenty of input from its users that go into its News Feed algorithm. It tailors what posts show up on a user’s page based on engagement patterns on the social network.
“There has always been a filter showing you — the user — the most engaging content to you,” Facebook’s Elizabeth Diana told The Post.
At the heart of the debate is whether Facebook should curate people’s pages or show them every post from everyone and every brand they have followed.
The hint of impropriety comes from the fact that brands can pay for promoted posts to reach all their fans — actually, regular users can pay for the same privilege.
Cuban said that Facebook assumes it knows better than users what they want to see.
“Isn’t that why they liked or subscribed to a page? Do you fan a page with the expectation you might miss the one thing that you wanted to see?” Cuban said.
To reach all the people who like the Mavericks, Cuban said he has to pay $3,000 for every million reached.
“Per fan, what Mark Cuban was complaining about was paying less than 1 cent to reach each person on Facebook, which is a huge bargain,” said Brendan Irvine-Broque, director of growth at PageLever, a firm that helps brands’ reach on Facebook.
The company said that while it tightened the algorithm to muffle “spammy” noise, the average reach of page posts has stayed the same since the tweak in September.
Marketers like Cuban saw diminished reach, while others saw an increase.
“People are complaining, ‘My reach has gone down, my reach has gone down.’ Actually, on average that’s not true,” Diana said. “What is true is, people are posting not so awesome content.
“Now, the bar for engagement is a little bit more raised.”