Adweek is by far one of my favorite sites to check daily brought out another interesting article yesterday titled “Brand Publishers Are Ditching Facebook in Favor of Microsites” by Michelle Castillo.

This article brings up an extremely important point in regards to Facebook’s recent change in organic reach, which results in companies having to use paid media. We talked about paid media in class and the article we read as a class prep suggested that brands use a more holistic approach called “Convergent Media” (a mix between paid, owned & earned) – but Brands are creating a completely new set of rules by using Microsites.

Image sourced from: AdWeek

Basically Microsites as mentioned in the article are a Brand owned spaces, where as Facebook is considered a rented space. There’s a great analogy in the article that really sums things up: “By and large, I view owned spaces as the farm and rented spaces as the market where you sell the crops—you can personalize your stall, but you can’t design the market.”

And that’s how everything is changing now. People do not want to be owned by Facebook rather they want to have their own space to be creative with. Facebook then is simply used to drive traffic to the site – but keeping other advertising to an absolute minimum.

If this will be successful – I don’t know EA Sports has started testing it – and who knows maybe other brands will soon follow.