Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Through newsfeed, yes. This is the great irony the whole situation. There’s a literal panic in the streets. There are people protesting outside the office. There is somebody trying to use a crane to get into the third story. Basically a TV truck is trying to cover what’s happening in the pandemonium. At the same time, despite everyone telling them, I hate this thing, it’s the worst thing ever. If you look at the analytics, people love it. People cannot get enough of scrolling through the new newsfeed. The reason they’re really upset is actually quite interesting. They’re saying, oh it’s sharing this with my whole network. Okay, but you updated it on your profile, which has always been public to your whole network. I think Facebook for the first time stepped in it and realized, oh, even though technically this data has always, we didn’t change how public or private it is, it’s just as accessible, people react really strongly when you change the ease of obtaining that information or whether it feels like you are pushing that information out versus someone is pulling by going to your profile and viewing. It went from pull to push. So it’s the start of the new school year. We’ve just come off this tumultuous summer. Growth had slowed, walked away from the Yahoo deal. There’s this revolt in the streets against newsfeed, which to Mark’s mind along with open reg, which was supposed to come two days later of opening up Facebook to anybody, they delayed that because of the newsfeed reaction. But to Mark’s mind, the two of these things are the big growth levers to reignite growth for Facebook. The board, the management team, everybody’s like, all right, we got to roll news feedback. People hate it. This is PR 101, we apologize, we roll it back. To add a kicker, newsfeed actually significantly hurt Facebook’s revenue because where do you think all the page views were coming from and all the refreshes?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.