Friday, December 1, 2017

How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed

TECHNOLOGY

How 41 People in Lithuania Took Over Your Facebook Feed

The Shift

By KEVIN ROOSE NOV. 30, 2017

Tomas Banisauskas is the founder of Bored Panda, one of the biggest attractions on Facebook. The company is based in Vilnius, Lithuania. CreditAndrej Vasilenko for The New York Times

Of all of Facebook’s superpowers, perhaps the most disconcerting is how it can make online publishers disappear with the push of a button.

Think I’m exaggerating? Just look at what happened to websites like Upworthy, Viralnova and Distractify, which amassed enormous Facebook followings and then faded from view after the site’s algorithm started to weed out pages that published hyperbolic headlines and low-value fluff. Other publishers that depend on Facebook for a large portion of their traffic — which is to say, most of them — fear they could be next under the guillotine.

But there is also a remarkable story about longevity in the Facebook publishing world. It comes, improbably, from Vilnius, Lithuania, where a small but mighty digital publisher is successfully navigating the changing tides of Facebook’s algorithms. Its story illustrates the qualities needed to survive in today’s Facebook-dominated digital media world: agility, lean operations, a clearly defined brand and a fair bit of luck.

The company, Bored Panda, might not be familiar to you. But if you have a Facebook account and a pulse, you’ve probably seen its handiwork. Maybe it was “10+ Before-and-After Pics That Prove Men Look Better With Beards,” or “41 Times Uber Drivers Surprised Their Clients.” Or perhaps you watched “Shh, Don’t Wake Them,” a 49-second video montage of dogs, cats and hamsters sleeping peacefully.

Lightweight and inoffensive posts like these have made Bored Panda one of the biggest attractions on Facebook. Its page received more than 30 million likes, shares, comments and reactions last month, far more than companies like BuzzFeed, CNN and The New York Times, according to NewsWhip, which compiles data on social media publishers. Its website had 116 million visitors in October, according to its internal analytics.

The company has done all this without raising outside funding, unlike digital powerhouses such as BuzzFeed and Vice, which have collected hundreds of millions of dollars. It also has only 41 employees, and the low operating costs, along with its enormous popularity, have made for good business. Tomas Banisauskas, Bored Panda’s founder, told me he expects to be profitable this year with $20 million to $30 million in revenue, mostly from the advertisements that appear on its website. Roughly 90 percent of its web traffic comes from Facebook, making the social network by far the biggest factor in Bored Panda’s success.

“They’re a really helpful company for us,” Mr. Banisauskas, 31, said of Facebook.

Bored Panda began as a side project in 2009, while Mr. Banisauskas, then a freelance videographer, was studying business administration at Vilnius University. He was inspired by feats of internet creativity like the Million Dollar Homepage, in which an entrepreneur auctioned off a million pixels on a website for $1 each. And he came up with the idea for a website that would, as he put it, “fight boredom with art and good news stories.”

A recent post on Bored Panda’s Facebook page. The company publishes lightweight and inoffensive posts.

On the content side, Bored Panda’s strategy followed a familiar playbook. It collected user-generated content from Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms and repackaged it with tempting headlines. But by focusing on art, photography and other creative pursuits, and by studiously sticking to the kind of apolitical content that few people object to, Bored Panda has steadily built a feel-good, escapist empire.

Bored Panda has the advantage of getting most of its content free from up-and-coming artists and other creative types who want the kind of exposure a large Facebook page can bring. (And, yes, it does ask for permission. I contacted several artists whose work had been featured on Bored Panda, and all said they’d given their blessing.) It has also adopted a quality-over-quantity strategy that appears to have served it well. It published only 519 articles in October, or roughly 16 posts a day, according to NewsWhip. Compare that with CNN, which published 5,595 articles during the month, and Fox News, which published 51,919 articles.

It hasn’t been a straight line to success. In its early days, Bored Panda relied on StumbleUpon, a link aggregation site that was popular at the time, for much of its traffic. But in 2010, according to Mr. Banisauskas, StumbleUpon sharply reduced Bored Panda’s prominence on the site and pressured him to buy ads instead.

As Mr. Banisauskas would later write in a post on Medium, the experience taught him that “the only way to survive in this industry is to build long-term value through loyal followers.”

The next several years were a struggle, but in 2013, Bored Panda began to see a spike in viewers being sent from a new source: Facebook. Its positive, lighthearted content was a hit with the social network’s users, and the site’s traffic grew tenfold in a single year. Soon, despite Mr. Banisauskas’s intentions, Bored Panda was far from self-sufficient — its prospects hinged almost entirely on Facebook.

More recently, while its competitors have hedged their risks by diversifying away from Facebook, Bored Panda has made a conscious effort to pull the platform even closer. It has started several offshoot Facebook brands, including pages for art and animal-themed stories, and a page called Crafty Panda that focuses on D.I.Y. projects. It has begun creating original content, too, and recently set up a video studio in its office, a hospital from the 19th century that was converted into a tech office complex.

“Everyone wants to be not so dependent on Facebook,” Mr. Banisauskas told me. “At the same time, it’s impossible — Facebook is the place where people share their ideas.”

Mr. Banisauskas says he expects $20 million to $30 million in revenue this year.CreditAndrej Vasilenko for The New York Times

But dependence comes with real risk. Last month, for example, Facebook began testing a new design for its news feed. In this version, which is being tested in six countries, Facebook posts from pages (including businesses, public figures and publishers like Bored Panda) were removed from the regular news feed. They were placed in a separate section called “Explore Feed,” where they appeared less prominently.

This change caused tremors in the Facebook publishing world. Several publishers from countries included in the test complained that their Facebook traffic had plummeted overnight. A social media manager from a news site in Slovakia, one of the countries included in the test, called it the “biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen.”

Facebook told me it planned to continue testing the Explore Feed changes for several more months. In a blog post, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, wrote that the test was meant to “understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” but that the company had “no plans to roll this test out further.”

Rafat Ali, a digital publishing veteran and chief executive of the travel media company Skift, said that while these particular algorithmic changes might not come to pass, sites like Bored Panda could still be easily crushed by a future Facebook experiment.

“You never know when the rug could be pulled from under them,” Mr. Ali said. “They could be done in a year or two.”

Mr. Banisauskas knows that Facebook can be a fickle landlord, and he worries that as a small foreign company that specializes in aggregated entertainment content, Bored Panda is in a more precarious position than most. Roughly half of Bored Panda’s Facebook audience is American, and Mr. Banisauskas worries that the site could be punished inadvertently by efforts to combat fake news and Russian-style influence campaigns.

“We’re not part of the problem,” he said, “but we could get the collateral damage.”

Last summer, Mr. Banisauskas traveled to New York to meet with a group of other Facebook-focused publishers. All these companies produce entertaining material that reaches millions of people every day. In another era, that alone might have been enough to guarantee them a stable future. Today, they exist at Facebook’s mercy and might be wiped away at any moment.

For now, though, Bored Panda is charging ahead, and hoping to remain on Facebook’s good side.

“Everyone should be worried,” Mr. Banisauskas said, before he injected a note of Bored Panda-style positivity: “But I believe everything will work out well.”

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Nudity, high living, intense emotion, danger, tragedy and erotic allure

A new book looks at Roman choices of mythological subjects

By R.R.R. SMITH

26th April 2017 22:00 GMT

Roman painting from the House of the Citharist, Pompeii, of the seductive Greek heroine Ariadne sprawled on the beach awaiting rescue by Dionysos, the saviour god of drink and enjoyment (around AD50-79). Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum, Naples.

While waiting in southern Italy to part from her husband Marcus Brutus during the Roman civil wars, the aristocratic Porcia found herself overcome with emotion in contemplating a mythological picture. This was a painting of Andromache and Hector taking leave of each other at Troy through which Porcia made a detailed comparison of her sad situation with that of the Trojan heroine. Porcia and Brutus were top-level Roman viewers: they breathe the refined air of Hellenic literature, art and mythology.

At some distance towards the other end of the social scale, however, we also find an ageing citizen, one Allius, comparing his deceased girlfriend with the heroine-huntress Atalanta—the point of comparison is her beautiful legs. He had shared her with a friend in a long and harmonious threesome, and he and this companion, Allius writes, were as close as Orestes and Pylades. Romans of many social stations saw themselves in the refracting mirror of Greek heroic myth. In poetry and pictures, their emotions, experiences and aspirations were mediated and intensified by mythological comparison and contemplation.

Greek myth pervaded Roman art and figured artefacts well into late antiquity, and the large Hellenistic back catalogue of mythological images provided a protean and expressive repertoire capable of responding to almost any contemporary need. We want then to understand Roman choices: why that heroic story for this place, time and context, and how were its inherited visual schemes, which made the story recognisable, adjusted for its new setting?

The interaction of Roman life and Greek visual myth has been a fertile area of recent research, and Zahra Newby’s excellent new book, Greek Myths in Roman Art and Culture, distils some of the best work on this subject and adds its own perspective—that of rhetorical exemplarity. It is concerned principally with three large bodies of mythological art: villa statuary, Pompeian wall painting and Roman sarcophagi. One of its many strengths is its carefully researched presentation of the precise contexts in which the art was experienced. Breathtaking marble groups from aristocratic seaside villas, romantically themed fresco pictures in the houses of provincial Pompeian office-holders, and small marble sarcophagi from the tomb interiors of Ostian craftsmen need all to be assessed rather differently, according to their context and function.

With such sensitivity to context, it is surprising that class and social level are here vigorously excluded from any shaping role. It should by now be clear that much of Roman art under the Empire comes from its socially middling levels: tradesmen, contractors, workshop owners and prosperous ex-slaves. And although there is nothing particularly middle-class about individual choices of mythological art, it remains significant and interesting to find out which myths in aggregate were in fact favoured at such levels. The class aspect of the extraordinary body of second-century sarcophagi that carry mythological friezes can be documented and is perhaps more pointed than current thinking allows. A lot were certainly for non-elite buyers, and they have among the most extraordinary range of mythological narratives from antiquity. Their densely packed and brilliantly imbricated scenes, run together in continuous friezes, are also unusually difficult to read.

Without detailed knowledge of Euripidean drama, a viewer would have no idea what is represented, for example, on Medea sarcophagi. In what ways the peculiar mythological choices of these sarcophagi intersected with class is a large open question—but one worth asking. If buyers were busy middle-level urban entrepreneurs, they were less likely to be familiar with the elite texts of the kind that many modern sarcophagus interpreters would like them to have been reading. Newby would like to see in mythological art at Rome “storehouses of rhetorical exempla”—that is, images that formulated exemplary ideas about Roman behaviour and identity such as we know from texts. She is then a bit surprised that the art studied is not really interested in the iconography of Roman manliness, piety and moral behaviour. It is observed correctly that the art could have been full of uplifting stories from early Roman history but they are almost nowhere to be seen. Further, the subjects that were chosen also rarely answer to this prescription (if needed, Greek myth had indeed plenty of pious stories of family concord and fierce patriotism). It is perhaps better then to leave the exempla and their moralising texts where they belong, in another part of the complex Roman cultural landscape, and to concentrate on the visual claims of the surviving art in its local contexts.

Some aristocratic old-school Romans under the Empire may have continued to see their lives in terms of distinctively “Roman” values. Most others, however, seem to have cared, at least in the privacy of their houses and tombs, more for the palpable, seductive power of certain kinds of Greek visual myth—those with pervasive nudity, sumptuous evocations of high living, high-pitched emotionality, danger, tragedy and erotic allure. This was the mirror in which Romans chose to contemplate their refracted vision of Hellenistic-style self-fulfillment.

• R.R.R. Smith is the Lincoln professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford with research interests in Greek and Roman art, and the author of The Last Statues of Antiquity (2016, with Bryan Ward-Perkins)

Greek Myths in Roman Art and Culture: Imagery, Values and Identity in Italy, 50BC-AD250

Zahra Newby

Cambridge Uni

Artists are getting poorer

Survey finds most earn less than £10,000 a year

MELANIE GERLIS

30th November 2017 08:03 GMT

A new survey reveals that most artists earn less than £10,000 a year Alice Achterhof

The majority of artists in the UK earn less than £5,000 a year after tax—and below $10,000 in the US—according to a survey of 1,533 practitioners, conducted this month by the online artist-to-market website Artfinder.

Dubbed the “Artist Income Project”, this first survey of anonymous data across several platforms, including Artfinder, finds “artists are still not paid fairly. Or at all.” All the surveyed artists are described as “independent”, meaning they sell their art directly, rather than through a gallery.

In the UK survey of 823 artists, 55.1% say they earn between £1,000 and £5,000 net per year while 17.7% earn between £5,000 and £10,000. At the raw end, 9.3% of UK artists state their income as zero. This combined figure of 82.1% is worse than the findings of a previous survey of 1,061 artists, conducted by a-n, an artist data company, which in 2013 found that 72% of artists earned under £10,000.

Of the US respondents, 75.2% make less than $10,000, with the majority (48.7%) in the $1,000 to $5,000 bracket; 5.1% in the US stated their income as nothing. Based on the 98% of artists who stated their gender, female artists across both geographies fared marginally worse than their male counterparts: 83.6% earned under £10,000 (versus 77% men).

This survey may only be a small slice of the whole, but its findings ring true, says Rob Pepper, the recently appointed principal of London’s The Art Academy school—and a practicing artist. “I used to believe that winning prizes was a mark of success for an artist but am now of the opinion that simply living as an artist is the greatest achievement,” he says.

Artfinder’s data is a part of a global survey of 10,000 of artists on its site, of whom almost half (47%) say that their artistic practice accounts for less than a quarter of their income; 15% say they work full time jobs while also selling their art.

Pepper says The Art Academy’s forthcoming Bachelor of Arts includes a professional development module that covers additional income streams for artists, including making limited edition works and teaching.

The situation is not particularly better for artists who sell through galleries, Pepper says. “One friend told me his sales target for a one-month show was £100,000. This is enormous pressure, plus his gallery only gives him a show every 18 months at best. Take off gallery commission [usually 50%], VAT, then studio costs in London over two years—you’re not even making £10,000.”

VANTAG galeria

Friday, December 1, 2017