“ It is in Facebook's interest to make sure media organizations have the means to produce the content that makes Facebook the front door to the Internet; that Facebook would make this change knowing it will hurt media organizations (the company wrote in a second blog post that "We anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages") suggests to me not that the company is out to make money off of the media, but rather that more pressing priorities were worth the collateral damage.

It will be interesting to see how that damage is distributed. Obviously organizations that have invested in differentiation strategies predicated on making their sites or apps "destination sites" will fare but better, but I also think the other extreme — companies built on Facebook from first principles — will do better than expected. For example, BuzzFeed's entire business is predicated on understanding how content is shared by, you guessed it, friends and family; this shift makes their core competency that much more valuable. BuzzFeed has also been buying Facebook ads to seed its native advertising articles for years; that expertise can certainly be shared if it ends up making financial sense.

The companies that will predictably be in trouble are those in the middle: doing a little bit here to differentiate, a little bit there to be popular on Facebook, or more likely, not thinking nearly deeply enough how much strategy, business model, distribution, and editorial need to be aligned.”