Publishers on Facebook

Facebook has pretty much managed to convince publishers to put their content on its powerful platform. The value proposition is simple: Facebook knows how to sell mobile ads against that content as opposed to helpless publishers whose current revenues from mobile ads are very small. Publishers can keep 70% of the ad revenues sold by the Facebook (they can keep 100% of ad revenues they generate). For publishers, this is a substantial revenue potential, while they have no real alternative. Facebook's mobile display ad revenue share is 35%, by far the largest and still growing fast. Moreover, an overwhelming proportion of the traffic to publishers' sites already comes from Facebook (see WSJ chart), which is mostly accessed by via smartphones. If this trend holds up - as it seems to - publishers have no choice but to upload (some) of their content on Facebook.