It isn't a popular opinion, but my feeling is that publishers' power in the marketplace is severely underestimated. For those of us on HN who do use Facebook, t

It isn't a popular opinion, but my feeling is that publishers' power in the marketplace is severely underestimated. For those of us on HN who do use Facebook, the content experience is pretty similar: a few juicy friend updates per [day? week?]. One or two good articles. Then a morass of terrible, spammy content. It's clear that actual users don't put enough into the FB ecosystem to make FB interesting for people each day, despite FB's best efforts. Content owners therefore have quite a bit of power. Because if FB suddenly stopped surfacing one or two great The Atlantic pieces per day, FB gets noticeably worse for me as a single user. The old economics of journalism are: publications get 100% of ad revenue. The Google economics (2001 - 2012) are that publishers get ~65% of revenue and Google gets ~35%. That is self-evidently failing. [1] And Facebook built instant articles on those now-failing economics. The price system is working. Which is why IAs are getting less popular. Maybe a decentralized web isn't such a bad thing. [1] I'm self-interested: I cofounded a software company in this space, premised on empowering content producers.