Pivot to video

"Pivot to video" is a phrase referring to the trend, starting in 2015, of media publishing companies cutting staff resources for written content (generally published on their own web sites) in favor of short-form video content (often published on third-party platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok).[1][2] These moves were generally presented by publishers as a response to changes in social media traffic or to changes in the media consumption habits of younger audiences. However, many media commentators have argued that this shift was primarily motivated by advertising revenue, and that only advertisers, not consumers, prefer video over text.[3][4] The pivot's contribution to job loss in the media industry has given the phrase "pivot to video" an association with decline, especially in a business context.

Commentators have also noted a lack of transparency and accuracy in the viewership metrics reported by platforms such as Facebook, pointing out that abrupt shifts in platforms' proprietary algorithms can have devastating effects on publishers' viewership, traffic, and revenue.[2][5][6][7] Following a scandal in which Facebook revealed it had artificially inflated numbers to its advertisers about how long viewers watched ads, many journalists and industry analysts concluded that the shift to video was based on such misleading or inaccurate metrics, which created a false impression that there was customer demand for additional video content.[8][9][10]

History

Streaming media technology has been available since the early 1990s, though it was relatively low-fidelity and not widely available until the mid-2000s.[11] In 2007, traditional media publishers including the New York Times, Washington Post and Time Inc. created new divisions to develop web videos, and Facebook launched its video platform.[12] Twitter purchased micro-video service Vine in October 2012, began adding native video streaming in late 2014, and acquired video-streaming service Periscope in January 2015.[13]

An August 2014 profile on BuzzFeed noted the publisher's large investment into video production, and observed that "the future of BuzzFeed may not even be on BuzzFeed.com. One of the company’s nascent ideas, BuzzFeed Distributed, will be a team of 20 people producing content that lives entirely on other popular platforms, like Tumblr, Instagram or Snapchat."[5]

As euphemism

In 2017, Journalist Brian Feldman said that Pivoting to video' has become a business strategy for digital publishers common enough in recent months to be a kind of cliché — a slick way to describe something else: layoffs."[43] In response, writers use the phrase as gallows humor shorthand for death or cancellation, as in "how do i tell my bf i want our relationship to pivot to video" (SkyNews' Mollie Goodfellow)[44] or "Horse broke its leg, so we had to take it out back and help it 'pivot to video'" (blogger Anil Dash).[45]

Facebook metrics controversy

In September 2016, Facebook admitted that it had reported artificially inflated numbers to its advertisers about how long viewers watched ads leading to an overestimation of 60-80%.[46] Plaintiffs in a later court case allege the discrepancy was as high as 150-900%.[47] Facebook apologized in an official statement and in multiple staff appearances at New York Advertising Week.[48][49] Two months later, Facebook disclosed additional discrepancies in audience metrics.[50][51] In October 2018, a California federal court unsealed the text of a class action lawsuit filed by advertisers against Facebook, alleging that Facebook had known since 2015 that its viewership numbers were highly inflated, that internal records showed it "was far from an honest mistake", that Facebook waited over a year before taking action to disclose or fix the problem, citing internal communications that "somehow there was no progress on the task for the year" and decisions to "obfuscate the fact that we screwed up the math."

See also

• Digital first, another shift in publishing production
• Enshittification
• Chokepoint Capitalism