Facebook now expects page-owners like Low-tech Magazine to pay in order to show updates to all their subscribers. We don’t plan to do this — except we have to do it for this post or almost nobody will read it.
If you are a FB-subscriber and you want be informed of new articles, there are two options:
- Go to Low-tech Magazine’s fan page, hover your mouse over where it says “LIKED” and click on “Add to Interests Lists”. (Thanks to E4C for this advice).
- Dump Facebook and subscribe to new updates via Twitter, Email, or RSS/feed (Low-tech Magazine, No Tech Magazine). If you’re looking for a good feed-reader after the demise of Google Reader: Feedly is even better.
Update: Since some people have asked for it, here is some more information about what happened precisely. Facebook still shows updates to about 10% of our subscribers. Until some weeks ago, each update was viewed by an average of 5,000 people, since then this has become an average of 500 people. This is in line with the observations by other page owners. The change has nothing to do with declining popularity: the new posts are not less popular than the ones before (which we can easily check by dividing views by likes and shares).
Facebook does what it wants, of course, but as a news consumer I don’t see the value of a news medium that selects news articles based on what publishers are willling to pay.
