Guardian kills its Facebook social reader, regains control over its content

gigaom reporting:

After a year-long experiment that saw its Facebook “social reading” app gain more than six million monthly users — and then lose more than half of those after the network changed the way those apps work — the Guardian has decided to take back control of its content.

photo: Flickr user Faramarz Hashemi

A little over a year ago, a big topic of discussion in the newspaper business — apart from the ongoing cataclysmic decline in print advertising revenue, of course — was how to leverage Facebook as a platform for content, and specifically the rise of what were called “social reading” apps, which were like mini-newspapers housed within a Facebook page. The Washington Post and The Guardian were among those who launched these applications, and for a time they drove a substantial amount of traffic, until Facebook changed the way they worked. Now the Guardian has said it is effectively shutting down its app and will be pushing readers from the social network to its website instead, so that it can retain more control over what happens to its content.
The Guardian‘s app now has a large banner ad that says “The Guardian app is changing” and links to a blog post on the newspaper’s website by product manager Anthony Sullivan. In that post, Sullivan notes that the paper launched the social-reading app in November of last year as an experiment in how to use social platforms like Facebook to increase the readership of the Guardian’s content and allow people to share it more easily. Those goals have been achieved, he said, with millions of people — more than six million a month, at the peak usage of the app — engaging with the paper’s stories, many of them outside the Guardian‘s typical demographic:
 ...
Although Sullivan’s post doesn’t go into specifics about why the paper decided to make this shift, there have been a couple of major changes in the way that Facebook handles social-reading apps over the past year, and they almost certainly played a role in changing the Guardian‘s mind about the benefits of allowing the giant social network to have so much control over its content. The biggest change was to alter how frequently links to stories from the Guardian and other social-reading apps showed up in the Facebook stream of real-time updates from users, which are all based on what the network calls “frictionless sharing” from apps....
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/guardian-kills-its-facebook-social-reader-regains-control-over-its-content/