The decision of switching to Community Notes and getting rid of third party fact checkers has led to widespread backlash and led to widespread concerns among ad partners. Now Meta is looking to assure its ad partners by implementation of variances in its approach.
It has been communicated by Meta to advertisers that the Community Notes would be applicable to organic posts and not paid ads. This is different from approach of X which does not allow Community Notes to be added to any of its post whether its paid or organic.
If we consider from moral standpoint, this is a better approach which would be providing more transparency in advertising but it seems that Meta is not willing to take on the risks associated with it and the impact it could have on its major revenue stream. As per a spokesperson from Meta, they would be transitioning to Community Notes in the next couple of months in the US and will continue to improve and evaluate it over the course of the year. Any assumptions being made regarding the product is a mere speculation apart from the official communication given by the company.
In its approach of towards managing political content, Meta has gone ahead and scrapped its US fact checking program last week and has announced plans for a system of Community Notes ahead of the President elect Donald Trump inauguration.
It would start phasing Community Notes in the US over the next couple of months and improve the model over the year. As per Meta, it has communicated to advertisers that Community Notes won’t be applicable to organic posts and not paid ads but its official communication hasn’t gone into details regarding brand and influencer un promoted posts.
This new system might push creators and advertisers to leave organic content altogether for avoiding the risk of Community Notes. There seems to be confusion as brands are trying to figure out how their paid and organic messages would get affected. We might also see disappearance of sponsored content on creator pages.
Meta Platform has assured its advertisers that its Community Notes will let users crowdsource annotations on posts that they believe are false or requiring context won’t apply to paid ads when they would be arriving later this year.
Organic sponsored posts made up about 25% to 50% of brands marketing campaigns on Meta platforms. Creators rely on such material for filling out their branded content earnings and brands use it for complementing the posts they pay to boost.
Advertiser had been waiting to learn how they would get affected since Zuckerberg stated that he was ending fact checking and introducing community notes in its place.
At the moment, Meta lets advertisers pay influences for promoting their products with branded content tags attached for increasing transparency but still there is no clarification if these would also be exempted from Community Notes once Meta implements the same.
In case Meta is looking to maximize its ad revenue, it would be really interesting to find out how Meta would be looking to approach this element when its community notes would be activated which will happen in the coming few weeks.
It is being said this hurried implementation of Community Notes is being done in order to appease President Trump. As of now everything else looks in a flux and full details would be available soon. Meta has been major part of marketing strategies of many companies. The company went on to collect $40 billion in revenue during Q3 of 2024 which is 19% more than the previous year and 96% of its revenue came from ad sales.
