TIME hates on social networks but has no problem using them

Why is TIME calling Facebook dead? That’s a little premature isn’t it. At first it struck me as a serious case of sour grapes. One thing to note is that the article was published on April 1st but as far as I can tell it’s not an April Fools joke. Another factor that leads me to believe that this is a legitimate rant post is that TIME has a rich history of hating on the Internet.

Facebook Takes a Dive: Why Social Networks Are Bad Businesses – TIME

The business of having online sites with content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs never had a reasonable chance of making money.

This is some serious hatred here. To TIME’s credit, if they’re right and Facebook (along with all free online content business models) fail, they get to stand with completely validated smugness and stick their tounge at everyone. If they’re wrong, they probably won’t be around to take any flack for it.

Now I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for contrarianism but this seems to take it to a whole new level.

The Ultimate Irony

As I got to the end of the article (fortunatley it’s short) I was struck by, what I thought was the ultimate irony.

They may hate social media and it’s free distribution model but they have no problem taking advantage of it. In fact when you do a search for the title of the article (which I did to try and find out if it was an April Fools Day joke) the #1 result is of course the TIME article while #2 & #3 where the Digg and Mixx site submissions of the article. Not only that but you can see from the StumbleUpon extension I use that the TIME article was also submitted to StumbleUpon. Anyone who is familiar with these sites knows that individually they can send hundreds of thousands of visitors and in many cases easily a million+ visitors.

TIME has obviously figured out how to play the social media game to gain traffic. In fact more and more I’m seeing a trend of “Digg Bait” style articles. They’ve even leveraged Digg functionality on their site. This from ReadWriteWeb:

Time, which wanted to show top stories on Digg had a proviso; it wanted to only show content that originated on Time. It was made possible using the Digg widget and according to Buch, extremely effective. “What we’ve found is that this tends to be more popular than even home spun ‘most popular’ widgets.” While he explained that it’s difficult to know why the Digg widget works better, he speculates it may be the sizing of the font used.

Now Facebook is not Digg but they are both free social networks that monetize through advertising. And most of the content shared on Digg is “content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs.” Does this strike anyone else as kind of hypocritical. I don’t mind TIME being Web savvy but someone that attacks the very services they’re using for free strikes me as someone who has a rather high DBQ.

Just sayin’

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