Facebook has wrecked its own product

After picking up 1,000+ new subscribers in the last few weeks, the AAV Substack audience is now 2% of the size of the AAV Facebook following, but that's not as small as it seems.

After a lull in writing regularly due to personal circumstances, I’ve been back posting pretty much daily for a few weeks, and the AAV Substack has picked up over 1,000 new subscribers as a result (welcome all!).

7,600+ subscribers might seem like a pretty minor milestone to celebrate because it’s only 2% of the 380,000+ people who follow the Another Angry Voice Facebook page, but it’s actually very good.

The problem with Facebook is that they’ve altered their algorithm to deprioritise content from independent pages like Another Angry Voice so that the vast majority of people who follow the page never actually see the posts.

The days of getting tens of thousands of Infographic shares, literally millions of link clicks, and being the most viral political writer of the 2017 General Election campaign are well and truly over.

You can see the scale of the problem in the literally hundreds of replies to my Facebook post that asked people to comment if they’ve not seen anything from me in a long time.

Loads of people thought they weren’t seeing my stuff anymore because I’d given up posting, rather than because the algorithm just hadn’t been showing them any of my posts for months or even years on end.

These days a typical post on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page is only even seen by about 1% of the page’s followers, while I can see from my Substack stats that around 45% to 55% of people generally open the emails they receive when I post a new article.

So when I post an article on Facebook only around 3,000 to 4,000 people even see the link in their feed, let alone click it, while on Substack around 3,000 to 4,000 people actually open and read some or all of the article.

Facebook has made it so incredibly difficult for content creators to connect with their own audiences that it’s now easy to to do significantly better on another platform with just 2% of the followers!

Despite their efforts to ruin their own product, I’m not going to give up posting to Facebook because 380,000+ is still an awful lot of people to potentially reach, even if Facebook is making it borderline impossible for most of them to see my content these days.

However, it’s clear that Substack is a much better and more efficient platform, so I’m going to post my long-form essays here, where I know they’ll actually be seen and read.

I’m also thinking about diversifying onto other platforms too. If you have any suggestions, I’d like to hear them in the comments …

If you are already subscribed here, thank you very much for supporting my work, and I hope I can live up to your expectations and continue to provide the kind of analysis that’s so sorely lacking in Britain’s venal right-wing dominated media.

If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so. That way you can decide for yourself if you want to read my stuff, rather than leaving it to the Facebook algorithm to near-certainly decide on your behalf that you don’t.

There’s the option to sign up for free, and I’ll never be hiding any of my political and economic articles behind a paywall.

Thanks for all the support. I literally couldn’t do it without you wonderful people.

Tom (AAV)