Good morning,

Apple has an event later this morning. You can be sure that John Gruber and I will be covering it first thing tomorrow on Dithering (ok, probably on Stratechery too, but no promises!).

Oh, and speaking of paid podcasts, Peter Kafka, who first broke the Facebook news below, added on Twitter:

On to the update:

Facebook’s Audio Announcements

From Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. is moving more aggressively into audio products, trying to compete with rivals such as Twitter Inc. and popular upstart Clubhouse. The social network on Monday is building a series of new audio-focused products, including virtual rooms where users can host live discussions, and a feature called “soundbites” that lets users post short audio snippets to their feed like they would a photo or video, according to Fidji Simo, head of the Menlo Park, California-based company’s main service.

Facebook will also create a podcasting feature so users can download and listen to podcasts directly from the main app, which will give the company a chance to compete with existing players like Apple Inc. Recode reported earlier on Facebook’s plans…Facebook will also enable tipping in audio rooms as a way to help content creators make money from their fans, something the company has done in the past with live videos.

Many of these products are still weeks if not months away. Facebook said it hopes to launch its live rooms product by summer.

Start with the last paragraph: as far as I can tell, none of these products are ready to launch, which makes this announcement a bit lame. Yes, yes, I get the constraints, particularly the fact that a global service like Facebook can’t simply make a feature broadly available at the flip of a switch; gradual rollouts with lots of testing are absolutely how it is done, which mean that any sort of coherent announcement has to be made in advance of general availability. Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that Facebook wants to make sure its name is included in the current onslaught of stories about audio.

As for the announcements themselves:

Live Audio Rooms

Live audio rooms are an obvious extension of Facebook’s social graph to a new medium, but I am skeptical for many of the same reasons I am skeptical about Twitter Spaces. First and foremost, both Twitter and Facebook are about scrolling a feed of information that is both visual and information dense. Audio content is the exact opposite — it is something you listen to in the background, and it is more about entertainment than information density. Yes, I understand that Twitter has your interest graph, and that Facebook has your social graph, but I continue to believe that mismatch in medium matters more than the relative advantage the two social networks have in terms of network (which is why I believe that Spotify is Clubhouse’s biggest rival).

Sound Bites

Sounds Bites are, according to Facebook’s blog post, “short-form, creative audio clips for capturing anecdotes, jokes, moments of inspiration, poems, and many other things we haven’t yet imagined.” Again, I’m pretty skeptical — I think there are many thing we haven’t yet imagined because this isn’t a format that makes a whole lot of sense. Listening to audio requires both deliberateness — you need to turn up your audio or put in headphones — and it’s slow. That’s fine when it’s what you are seeking out, but I’m not sure how much sense it makes in a feed.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did say in an interview with Casey Newton that Facebook would create a new kind of audio feed:

Like a Reel, we’re going to create this experience where you can basically just chain a bunch of them together for a long time, so it’s basically creating this dynamic algorithmic feed based on your interests around what different audio content that you can consume in the background.

Basically, do to podcasts what TikTok did to YouTube. This is a bit more compelling than standalone soundbites in the feed, but again, it’s going to take a mental shift for users to think of Facebook as a background audio app, and perhaps more importantly, it’s really hard to make audio viral.

Facebook’s Tools

This is where the “sound studio in your pocket”, as Facebook called it, comes in. I do have to say, the video of their recording technology is pretty impressive (with the rather large caveat that we are not actually seeing it in action, which is a bit of a red flag):

Facebook brags in their post:

We’ve been investing in audio technologies — such as speech-to-text and voice morphing — for a long time and will make them available in an audio creation tool directly inside the Facebook app. Through our advances in AI, we can make audio quality magically great — even if you record on a busy street corner. You will be able to use music from Facebook’s Sound Collection in the background of your story to set the tone. And with the ability to mix audio tracks, a growing collection of sound effects, voice effects and filters, it should be a lot of fun too.

I would bet this ends up having less utility for podcasts, for the same reason that Anchor missed the mark: no matter how good Facebook’s tech is — and I bet it’s quite good! — it will only matter so far as the audio content itself is compelling, which takes work…and if you’re willing to put in that work, why not go all the way and produce an actual podcast?

Podcasts

Speaking of podcasts, Facebook’s efforts here are a bit more compelling, for a few different reasons that are unique to podcasts. First is the fact that Facebook will immediately have access to nearly the entire universe of podcasts, thanks to the open nature of the medium. It’s not clear if Facebook will be a straight-up podcast player for arbitrary RSS feeds, or if it will ask podcasters to add their feeds to Facebook so that the company can ingest and stream them a la Spotify; I would bet on the latter (unfortunately that excludes paid podcasts like mine, which rely on users being able to add arbitrary RSS feeds).

The reason why most podcasts would be willing to get on board is straightforward. First, once you’ve gone to the trouble to record a podcast, why wouldn’t you make it as widely available as possible? Second, if your podcast is ad-supported, you have an economic imperative to do just that. Third, if there is any company that can figure out how to push podcast listening, algorithmically or through ads, it is Facebook. And, I would note, if the Sound Bites audio feed takes off that would be an amazing place to promote a podcast.

Still, I remain skeptical for all of the audio-related reasons I laid out above. Facebook just isn’t an audio app, and I think that matters. Yes, you could have said the same thing about video, but video is a visual medium — that’s the distinction that I think is important.

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That noted, Facebook does bring two unique strengths to the audio game.

Groups

Groups remains one of Facebook’s most underrated products, and one of Zuckerberg’s most prescient moves. It’s also a very natural fit for podcasts. Some of the best podcasts build a community around them; this is usually manifested through reader feedback or questions within an episode themselves, but Groups is a natural space to nurture that community outside the confines of a recording.

And, of course, Groups are a natural base for Live Audio, for the exact opposite reason: a recording that flows from a community.

Everyone Else

Facebook’s multi-billion user scale means that while the company may be a fast follower for these formats when it comes to the tech savvy, it will be the first to introduce them to much of the world (and that includes plenty of people in the United States). That even extends to podcasts: only 57% of U.S. adults have ever listened to a podcast, and only 41% have listened to one in the last month.

Facebook and Creators

The aforementioned interview between Newton and Zuckerberg was mostly about these audio announcements, but Zuckerberg also commented on the creative economy generally:

In developing all of these things, we’re actually really focused on the creator side, even more than on the consumption side. Clearly it needs to be a good consumption experience in order to enable creators to connect with folks, but I just think that there’s a big opportunity to allow all of these different groups to do new creative work, and to get paid for it. And then I think that this is one of the areas where I think our company has a lot to bring to the table, because we have built very advanced monetization tools and have a pretty robust economy, and are able to plug that into creators more broadly, not just in audio but in all these different categories…That’s a big thing that is growing quickly for gamers and game creators, journalists, influencers, all kinds of different creators, this is a big part of what I think needs to happen over the next five years. I do think we’ve hit some sort of inflection…where talented people like can easily make a living and do quite well.

I do think that a lot of the discussion of Twitter and especially Facebook relative to creators misses the mark, in large part because Facebook is viewed as having been bad for traditional publishers (leaving aside the reality that the Internet killed newspapers, not Facebook), and must therefore be bad for individual publishers. The truth is that social media is incredible for individual creators: if the most powerful marketing tool at the individual creator’s disposal is word-of-mouth, then by definition a platform that gives everyone a voice is a creator’s best friend.

At the same time, one of Zuckerberg’s best insights also explains why I’m not sure if Facebook is the best home for a creator. This was his response to Newton’s question about Facebook’s imminent newsletter product:

This is something I’m pretty excited about, because a lot of the journalists and folks who I think have been the most innovative online are not just doing newsletters. They do that, and they also do podcasts, because I think the mediums complement each other. There are thing that you can explore in a longer former conversation, but then when you’re writing, you’re getting a definitive and clearest possible version of something down, and it’s easier to excerpt.

I think a lot of people want both, and I think a product where a journalist or creator can create a subscription for people who want to follow them, that spans both a newsletter and a podcast, is going to be a really powerful thing. That’s a big part of what we’re going to enable with some of the monetization tools around podcasts that dovetails with the work that we’re planning to do around newsletters, and giving tools for independent journalists. I think enabling both of those things to come together on extremely favorable terms for journalists and creators will be a pretty powerful thing.

I have been arguing for years that the future of publishing is about employing different mediums for different parts of the funnel: text is good for user acquisition, and podcasts are great for monetization, for example (the fact that Stratechery monetized text first was path dependent on what was technically feasible; its fascinating to see that path continue). Zuckerberg is absolutely correct to be viewing a creator’s output holistically, not by medium.

But that gets back to the fundamentally constraining factor on Facebook’s audio plans generally: Facebook isn’t an audio app! And, for that matter, it’s not really a super-fan app either; the point of an algorithmic feed is to find the best of a wide range of content, but the best creator-fan connections come from fans that want to consume everything a creator produces. Zuckerberg has the right vision for creators, but the best realization of that vision will see creators use Facebook for its strengths — Groups and user acquisition — and other platforms and mediums for the formats and direct connections that Facebook is less well suited for. After all, another app is only a tap away, a far smaller barrier than pulling out your credit card in the first place.

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