Millions Of People Watched A 'Live' Looping GIF On Facebook, Because Facebook Is Dumb
A while back, Facebook decided to give "Live" video special treatment: a notification sent to your followers, auto-playing video, prominent newsfeed placement.
But producing good live video is difficult — you usually end up with a gimmick (remember that time Buzzfeed exploded a watermelon with rubber bands?) or something boring and hacked together. Publishers have been hacking the setup for a while, offering up things that are definitively not "live video" as Facebook Live video. But recently, the shamelessness has ratcheted up.
Take, for example, the fact that some publishers are posting still images as videos to increase engagement. Or take this Facebook Live from a page called Newsfeed, which appeared to show a live-stream of a massive storm and rocketed around Facebook on Thursday morning, amassing tens of millions of views:
It wasn't live video — it was a short, looping GIF that repeated itself for 4 hours. But by publishing it as a Facebook Live, Newsfeed hacked its way to an absurd number of views. Gizmodo dug into Newsfeed's page a bit more, and tracked down the guy who filmed the original storm:
Which is all to say: Facebook Live is broken, but Facebook is still going to shove it in our faces.
[Via Matt Navarra]
