ABC News, Facebook Get Slammed By the Press

Posted by Nick O'Neill on November 26th, 2007 1:23 PM

Last night I posted about ABC News closing a deal with Facebook in which they provide their content free of charge to Facebook users. Today the press responded and the response is overwhelmingly negative. Caroline McCarthy writes:

But ABC News doesn’t seem to have caught onto the fact that Facebook’s user base sees the site as a platform for social recreation, not information consumption. None of the front-runners in the list of most popular third-party applications on the site deal with politics or news–instead, they include Flixster’s movie rating application, Slide’s “Top Friends,” iLike’s music app, and the woefully addicting Scrabulous.

She makes a great point. Facebook users seem to be using the site for recreation. The release about the partnership also fails to mention that the content will be distributed through Facebook’s U.S. Politics application which currently has less than 5,000 active daily users ranking it among the least used applications on Facebook. So while the press release may state that ABC News now has access to Facebook’s more then 52 million users, odds are that ABC News won’t be getting much more exposure.

As far as I can tell, Facebook and ABC News simply used this partnership as a way to generate a little buzz in the press the Monday after Thanksgiving. Aside from that, this is pretty much an insignificant event.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.