Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Brandon Silverman knows more about how stories spread on Facebook than almost anyone. As co-founder and CEO of CrowdTangle, he helped to build systems that instantly understood which stories were going viral: valuable knowledge for publishers at a time when Facebook and other social networks accounted for a huge portion of their traffic. It was so valuable, in fact, that in 2016 Facebook bought the company, saying it would help the institutions of journalism identify stories of interest to help their own coverage plans.
But a funny thing happened along the way to CrowdTangle becoming just another tool in a publisher’s analytics toolkit. Facebook’s value to publishers declined after the company decided to de-emphasize news posts in 2018,…
