I recently spent time with Taylor Ablitt, co-founder and CEO of Diply, at the company’s offices. Diply is a social news and entertainment platform based in London, Ontario that generates five billion social impressions and one billion video views every single month. It has 68 million social media fans across platforms. It was just named the number one company on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50, with revenue growth of 92,881% over four years, nearly 74,000 percentage points higher than the second-place company. Taylor was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. The company has no venture capital backing. It was bootstrapped from the ground up.
Sitting with Taylor, you get a clear sense of the energy and ambition behind what his team has built. Diply represents the pinnacle of a business model that has reshaped digital media over the past five years: social-first content. The premise is straightforward. Instead of building a traditional media property and driving traffic through search, you create content designed to travel natively through social platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. The platform is the distribution. The audience lives there. You meet them where they are.
What Taylor and his team have achieved is extraordinary by any measure. But our conversation also touched on a question that the entire industry is now confronting. On January 11, thirteen days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would fundamentally change its News Feed algorithm to prioritize "meaningful social interactions" between friends and family over content from publishers and brands. For companies whose entire business flows through Facebook’s algorithm, that announcement should prompt a serious question: who actually owns the audience?
The Social-First Model
The economics of social-first media are seductive. You produce content at volume, optimized for the specific mechanics of each platform’s algorithm. If it resonates, the platform distributes it to millions at zero marginal cost. No SEO strategy required. No subscriber acquisition funnel. No paywall negotiations. The platform does the work of finding your audience, and you monetize the resulting impressions through programmatic and direct-sold advertising.
The numbers across the industry are staggering. UNILAD, the UK-based viral publisher, generated 39.6 billion Facebook video views in a recent 45-day period. NowThis, the social-only news brand, recorded 17 billion Facebook views in 2017 and became the number one news and politics brand on the platform. They were so committed to the social-first thesis that they shut down their own website entirely in 2015. BuzzFeed, the most prominent name in the space, targeted $350 million in revenue in 2017. LittleThings, a feel-good content publisher targeting women over 30, reached 58 million monthly visitors.
And then there is Diply. Built in a mid-sized Canadian city, without the venture capital infrastructure of New York or San Francisco, producing over 1,250 original videos and stories per month. The company recently hired Kirstine Stewart, former head of CBC English-language services and former VP of Twitter North America, as Chief Strategy Officer. By any conventional measure, this is a remarkable Canadian success story.
The Social-First Ecosystem (2017)
The Precedent Nobody Wants to Talk About
Before celebrating the scale, it is worth studying the pattern.
Upworthy was the original social-first sensation. In November 2013, it peaked at 87 million unique monthly visitors, driven almost entirely by Facebook shares. Then Facebook adjusted its algorithm to penalize clickbait-style headlines. By January 2014, Upworthy had dropped to 49 million visitors. By November 2014, it was hovering around 20 million. A 75% decline in twelve months, driven entirely by a platform decision that Upworthy had no role in making.
ViralNova followed a similar arc. Founded in May 2013 as a one-person operation, it grew to 100 million monthly uniques within seven months. Its founder reportedly earned over $400,000 per month at the peak. The company sold for roughly $100 million in 2015. Traffic subsequently collapsed as algorithmic conditions changed.
Mashable, once valued at $250 million after a funding round led by Turner Broadcasting, was sold to Ziff Davis in December 2017 for approximately $50 million. An 80% decline in valuation. Elite Daily, acquired by the Daily Mail for roughly $50 million in January 2015, saw its traffic halve within months. The Daily Mail wrote off the entire investment, absorbing a $31 million loss.
The pattern is consistent. Social-first media companies rise with extraordinary speed because they are riding a platform’s algorithmic tailwind. They decline with equal speed when the wind shifts.
January 11, 2018
Two weeks ago, Zuckerberg posted a message that should have sent a chill through every social-first publisher in the world. Facebook, he said, would reduce the amount of content from publishers and brands in the News Feed in favor of posts from friends and family that spark "meaningful social interactions."
Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed, was more direct: "We’re currently slightly overvaluing how much time people spend on our platform and undervaluing how many meaningful interactions they have with other people."
Read between the lines. Facebook is telling publishers that the distribution they have built their businesses on is about to contract. Not because the content is bad. Not because audiences do not want it. Because Facebook has decided to optimize for a different metric.
This comes on the heels of another uncomfortable revelation. In September 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had been overestimating average video viewing time by 60 to 80 percent for two years. Some analyses suggest the inflation was even higher. This inflated data drove an industry-wide "pivot to video" in which publishers laid off writers and editors to invest in video production for Facebook. The strategy was built on numbers that turned out to be wrong.
Publishers now find themselves in a compounding exposure: they pivoted their operations toward video based on inflated metrics, on a platform that just announced it is deprioritizing their content.
The Question Every Content Business Should Be Asking
The fundamental question is not about reach. It is about ownership.
When a publisher has five billion impressions a month on Facebook, those impressions belong to Facebook. The publisher has no direct relationship with the audience. No email address. No subscriber account. No mechanism to reach those people if the algorithm changes, which it just did.
Compare this to a company that uses social platforms as an acquisition channel rather than as its entire distribution infrastructure. A business that captures email subscribers, builds a direct community, or develops its own app is creating a relationship that no platform can unilaterally revoke. Social media drives discovery. Owned channels create durability.
The distinction matters because platforms optimize for their own business objectives, not for publisher welfare. Facebook’s January announcement is not an act of malice. It is a rational business decision to increase the time users spend on the platform by showing them content from their personal networks. But the consequence for publishers who built their entire business on Facebook’s previous optimization is severe.
The concept is sometimes described as "building on rented land." If you construct your business on a platform you do not own, you accept the risk that the landlord will change the terms. The rent can go up. The rules can shift. You can be asked to leave. And you have no recourse because you never owned the property.
What This Means Beyond Media
Platform dependency is not unique to digital publishers. The structural risk applies to any business that relies on a single channel it does not control.
E-commerce brands built entirely on Amazon’s marketplace face the same exposure. If Amazon changes its search algorithm, adjusts its fee structure, or decides to launch a competing private-label product, the seller’s business can be disrupted overnight. SaaS companies built on a single platform’s API, restaurants dependent on third-party delivery apps, retailers reliant on a single wholesale buyer. The pattern repeats across industries.
The strategic question is always the same: if your primary distribution channel changes its rules tomorrow, what percentage of your revenue survives?
At Innavera, this is a recurring conversation with the companies we advise. Growth strategy has to balance platform leverage with owned infrastructure. Platforms offer extraordinary reach and efficiency. But the companies that treat social and marketplace channels as their entire business model, rather than as one component of a diversified distribution strategy, are structurally fragile.
The strongest businesses use platforms to acquire audiences and then convert those audiences into direct relationships they own: email lists, communities, subscription models, proprietary apps. The platform drives the top of the funnel. Owned channels create the foundation.
Diply’s growth is genuinely extraordinary. Taylor Ablitt and his team built something remarkable from a mid-sized Canadian city, bootstrapped, with no venture capital. That achievement is real and it deserves recognition.
But five billion impressions a month and one billion video views mean something very different when you own the audience than when someone else does. The companies that will still be thriving five years from now are the ones asking that question today.
References
- Canadian Business / Deloitte (2017). Diply Tops Deloitte’s Fast 50 List of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies. canadianbusiness.com
- Fortune (2018). Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family. fortune.com
- NewsWhip (2017). How Diply Became One of the Biggest Publishers on Social Media. newswhip.com
- BetaKit (2017). Kirstine Stewart Joins Diply as Chief Strategy Officer. betakit.com
- Nieman Lab (2014). Upworthy’s Traffic Decline and the Limits of Social Publishing. niemanlab.org
- Wall Street Journal (2016). Facebook Overestimated Video Viewing Time for Two Years. wsj.com
