8 ms·

Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”

80 points by spicyj 11y ago

phreeza 11y ago
Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.
- smil 11y ago
  Of course they're desperate for views. Their whole business model is based on views. Which is why the media is of such awful quality today.
  - Yhippa 11y ago
    Absolutely. I feel that news "content" is now all very clickbaity which is a huge turnoff. I've had to stop following a lot of trusted media because they're trending towards clickbait. Ever since the WaPo got bought by Bezos and pals a lot of their content has trended that way. It's sad but I guess I understand that that's what they need to do to survive.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  How is this different than distribution of printed magazines, for example? Publishers produce their product and ship it to distribution centers. You can buy the magazines at the bus stop, or at the gas station, or even have it mailed to you. You can find the article on facebook, or when you searched bing, or maybe even subscribe to their newsletter, get mobile notification from their mobile app on your phone. And how is this publishers relinquishing their control? They will post on facebook no matter what. Integration with the platfrom gives them more data and another possible monetization stream with more perks on the way, I'm sure. What are they losing from this integration?
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Imagine if they sent their articles to the supermarket and the supermarket decided how to lay it out and what ads to run. And perhaps also interspersed your articles with articles from other sources you did not vet ahead of time.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      How is this different than what is happening today?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
- dcosson 11y ago
  I for one am hoping that this catches on, walled garden or not I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) and I trust facebook to build that better than anyone else. I'm also surprised publishers are going along with it though, it seems a little ironic. The only reason this product is interesting is because so many mobile articles today have horrible UIs. Native views will probably be nicer anyway but publishers could mostly fix this right now if they were willing to give up my accidental ad clicks. But instead they need someone like facebook to save them from themselves in order to make their content consumable again.
  - dcosson 11y ago
    Also, I've seen a few things recently talking about how as it continues to get easier engineering-wise to build consumer sites/apps quickly and scale them to big audiences, design becomes an even more important differentiator. This facebook launch is an interesting counter example to that idea in that they'll own much of the design and UI.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      "Design as differentiator" is the problem. There is an optimal way to design for readability, and all that "differentiation" usually does is making things worse and worse, because "we have to be different!".
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    > I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      As far as I can tell the hegemony of Google Reader kind of stunted the growth of everything else.
- frandroid 11y ago
  I think they're more desperate for advertising revenue than "views".
joelrunyon 11y ago
If this catches on, I don't see how it does anything but set a very bad precedent.
- bobbles 11y ago
  Bad for who though? Isn't it good for the writers? More people viewing the content? Isn't it good for the users? A better experience?
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    ah yes, thankfully facebook has only our best interests at heart.
  - joelrunyon 11y ago
    Bad for publishers. Continuing to relinquish control of their content & platform. Users - I'd rather not get my information from facebook.
  - Crito 11y ago
    Bad for society. Accurate metrics seem to drive down the quality of publications. Websites with near-omniscient metrics often find that the best way to drive traffic is to deliberately produce shit-tier articles that drive clicks through controversy or pandering. In the absence of accurate metrics, the writers/editors are forced to simply try their best to produce the best quality material. Their notion of what the "best quality" will be is informed by their background, generally set at universities. Writers who are not driven by metrics will push on society. Writers who are driven by metrics will be pushed by society.
    - smil 11y ago
      It's not the metrics, it's advertising as a business model.
      - Crito 11y ago
        What other business models for written articles are driven off these sort of fine-grain metrics?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- dagw 11y ago
  What's the benefit here? 70% of a big number is more than 100% of a small number?
- mseebach 11y ago
  > but why in the world would publishers give up 30% of their revenue For a better experience for the user that will plausibly lead to better "click-through" rates? I often don't click on articles on Facebook because I can't be bothered to wait 15-20 seconds for the page to load and stop re-flowing itself, then dismiss the "we use cookies" and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-over.
- smil 11y ago
  I read about this earlier today on /r/contentstrategist and they were saying that videos posted directly to Facebook get far, far more "plays" than if they are posted as links to YouTube. This is thanks to Facebook's AutoPlay for native videos, and whether people actually watch the videos more... Is not really interesting because plays/impressions is the metric by which a boss measures the marketing teams work, or how clients are billed. So, this works because Facebook makes native content more prominent than linked content, which is filtered out.
  - thanatropism 11y ago
    You can't fool bosses for very long.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      You can fool bosses for as long as they don't figure out a better metric, and bosses can hang on to invalid metrics for a fairly long time.
- mcintyre1994 11y ago
  Um, no? > Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported.
cromwellian 11y ago
This seems rather pointless given HTLM5 ServiceWorkers. All of the benefits they're claiming with respect to local prefetching content for offline, instant use can be done with that spec. Even push-message content updates when the mobile browser isn't even running can be achieved. The only missing component is IOS support which might be possible to polyfill in via a hybrid. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows about this, it seems like a platform lockin play.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Absolutely nobody is avoiding reading articles because they take too long to load but they have to have some sort of positive way of describing it.
  - wf 11y ago
    What? In my experience this has always been true on mobile. If something takes longer than a few seconds to load it gets closed or restarted.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      How many news articles take longer than a few seconds to load?
      - prezjordan 11y ago
        Many.
      - ascagnel_ 11y ago
        Through Facebook's in-app browser? Most. And you must at least start the load in the in-app browser to get the option to open it in the device's native browser.
  - ovulator 11y ago
    Some people may be on mobile devices, but obviously it isn't the articles that is taking to long to load. It is the layers and layers of blocking JavaScript used for tracking and serving up ads that are taking forever to load.
chinathrow 11y ago
No thank you no. Not for me - more lock-in, more tracking, higher hurdles for smaller news outlets. Edit: The new feature allows remote tracking by the news outlet. "- Compatibility with comScore traffic measurement - Compatibility Google Analytics to understand the audience - To make sure Google Analytics worked across all its content - Compatibility with BuzzFeed’s internal analytics tools - Control of design to make Instant Articles look and feel like BuzzFeed articles - Ability to work with BuzzFeed on special formats like quizzes - Monetization" And no chance of disabling tracking...
eva1984 11y ago
Another attempt to make Facebook's own Flipboard.
tyho 11y ago
Facebook wants to become the internet, and federate access to external material. No doubt that these "instant articles" will be free to access under internet.org and competing news outlets are suddenly put at a massive disadvantage.
brown9-2 11y ago
A bit ironic: instantarticles.fb.com is a CNAME to fbinstantarticles.wordpress.com.
- itsyogesh 11y ago
  It still has the wordpress favicon.
wodenokoto 11y ago
From a Facebook business point and feature point of view this is a great move. One of Facebook's original strengths against MySpace was how orderly everything was organized. No crazy gifs and insane colorschemes, no large backgrounds that had to load from photobucket. Of course there was also unlimited photo upload. I know a lot of politicians in Denmark use their Facebook profile for official comments on news matter and politics and I am sure a lot of them will be pleased to be able to publish more in depth material. Users will also be pleased with the certainty of the shape of the material. No pop-up, long loading time or noisy ads. Judging from buzz feeds response I am however surprised by the gutsy move to ask publishers to host content on Facebook without even offering a monetization plan!
p3rp3rtu41 11y ago
Facebook is not my desired source of news. The use case I had for Facebook is based upon it's original premise. Connecting with Friends, seeing what they are up to, where they are and sharing photos. They are littering their platform with features that further dilutes the experience that everyone used to like/love. I despise seeing Buzzfeed and clickbait titles on the site. This is not the content I want to consume here. How can they get this so wrong??
- untog 11y ago
  Because you aren't the average user. They do want this content, judging by the amount they click on it.
- spdionis 11y ago
  The original premise was actually finding girls. When I read your second sentence I actually thought you meant that.
emodendroket 11y ago
Participating in this seems unwise for publishers but I agree with everyone saying from Facebook's point of view this is smart.
edge17 11y ago
Does it also support ad placement? The "10x faster" is otherwise meaningless, since much of the weight of content on those partner sites undoubtedly comes from loading ads.
sparkzilla 11y ago
This is a trap for publishers. You only have to look at how Facebook treated small businesses. We built up 4000 fans on our fan page (in the meantime helping FB grow) then FB throttled access to them, making us pay to reach our own fans. FB cannot be trusted.

80 points by spicyj 11y ago

Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.

smil 11y ago
Of course they're desperate for views. Their whole business model is based on views. Which is why the media is of such awful quality today.
- Yhippa 11y ago
  Absolutely. I feel that news "content" is now all very clickbaity which is a huge turnoff. I've had to stop following a lot of trusted media because they're trending towards clickbait. Ever since the WaPo got bought by Bezos and pals a lot of their content has trended that way. It's sad but I guess I understand that that's what they need to do to survive.
blumkvist 11y ago
How is this different than distribution of printed magazines, for example? Publishers produce their product and ship it to distribution centers. You can buy the magazines at the bus stop, or at the gas station, or even have it mailed to you. You can find the article on facebook, or when you searched bing, or maybe even subscribe to their newsletter, get mobile notification from their mobile app on your phone. And how is this publishers relinquishing their control? They will post on facebook no matter what. Integration with the platfrom gives them more data and another possible monetization stream with more perks on the way, I'm sure. What are they losing from this integration?
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Imagine if they sent their articles to the supermarket and the supermarket decided how to lay it out and what ads to run. And perhaps also interspersed your articles with articles from other sources you did not vet ahead of time.
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    How is this different than what is happening today?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
dcosson 11y ago
I for one am hoping that this catches on, walled garden or not I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) and I trust facebook to build that better than anyone else. I'm also surprised publishers are going along with it though, it seems a little ironic. The only reason this product is interesting is because so many mobile articles today have horrible UIs. Native views will probably be nicer anyway but publishers could mostly fix this right now if they were willing to give up my accidental ad clicks. But instead they need someone like facebook to save them from themselves in order to make their content consumable again.
- dcosson 11y ago
  Also, I've seen a few things recently talking about how as it continues to get easier engineering-wise to build consumer sites/apps quickly and scale them to big audiences, design becomes an even more important differentiator. This facebook launch is an interesting counter example to that idea in that they'll own much of the design and UI.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    "Design as differentiator" is the problem. There is an optimal way to design for readability, and all that "differentiation" usually does is making things worse and worse, because "we have to be different!".
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  > I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    As far as I can tell the hegemony of Google Reader kind of stunted the growth of everything else.
frandroid 11y ago
I think they're more desperate for advertising revenue than "views".

joelrunyon 11y ago

If this catches on, I don't see how it does anything but set a very bad precedent.

bobbles 11y ago
Bad for who though? Isn't it good for the writers? More people viewing the content? Isn't it good for the users? A better experience?
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  ah yes, thankfully facebook has only our best interests at heart.
- joelrunyon 11y ago
  Bad for publishers. Continuing to relinquish control of their content & platform. Users - I'd rather not get my information from facebook.
- Crito 11y ago
  Bad for society. Accurate metrics seem to drive down the quality of publications. Websites with near-omniscient metrics often find that the best way to drive traffic is to deliberately produce shit-tier articles that drive clicks through controversy or pandering. In the absence of accurate metrics, the writers/editors are forced to simply try their best to produce the best quality material. Their notion of what the "best quality" will be is informed by their background, generally set at universities. Writers who are not driven by metrics will push on society. Writers who are driven by metrics will be pushed by society.
  - smil 11y ago
    It's not the metrics, it's advertising as a business model.
    - Crito 11y ago
      What other business models for written articles are driven off these sort of fine-grain metrics?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dagw 11y ago
What's the benefit here? 70% of a big number is more than 100% of a small number?
mseebach 11y ago
> but why in the world would publishers give up 30% of their revenue For a better experience for the user that will plausibly lead to better "click-through" rates? I often don't click on articles on Facebook because I can't be bothered to wait 15-20 seconds for the page to load and stop re-flowing itself, then dismiss the "we use cookies" and the "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-over.
smil 11y ago
I read about this earlier today on /r/contentstrategist and they were saying that videos posted directly to Facebook get far, far more "plays" than if they are posted as links to YouTube. This is thanks to Facebook's AutoPlay for native videos, and whether people actually watch the videos more... Is not really interesting because plays/impressions is the metric by which a boss measures the marketing teams work, or how clients are billed. So, this works because Facebook makes native content more prominent than linked content, which is filtered out.
- thanatropism 11y ago
  You can't fool bosses for very long.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    You can fool bosses for as long as they don't figure out a better metric, and bosses can hang on to invalid metrics for a fairly long time.
mcintyre1994 11y ago
Um, no? > Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

cromwellian 11y ago

This seems rather pointless given HTLM5 ServiceWorkers. All of the benefits they're claiming with respect to local prefetching content for offline, instant use can be done with that spec. Even push-message content updates when the mobile browser isn't even running can be achieved. The only missing component is IOS support which might be possible to polyfill in via a hybrid. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows about this, it seems like a platform lockin play.

emodendroket 11y ago
Absolutely nobody is avoiding reading articles because they take too long to load but they have to have some sort of positive way of describing it.
- wf 11y ago
  What? In my experience this has always been true on mobile. If something takes longer than a few seconds to load it gets closed or restarted.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    How many news articles take longer than a few seconds to load?
    - prezjordan 11y ago
      Many.
    - ascagnel_ 11y ago
      Through Facebook's in-app browser? Most. And you must at least start the load in the in-app browser to get the option to open it in the device's native browser.
- ovulator 11y ago
  Some people may be on mobile devices, but obviously it isn't the articles that is taking to long to load. It is the layers and layers of blocking JavaScript used for tracking and serving up ads that are taking forever to load.

chinathrow 11y ago

No thank you no. Not for me - more lock-in, more tracking, higher hurdles for smaller news outlets. Edit: The new feature allows remote tracking by the news outlet. "- Compatibility with comScore traffic measurement - Compatibility Google Analytics to understand the audience - To make sure Google Analytics worked across all its content - Compatibility with BuzzFeed’s internal analytics tools - Control of design to make Instant Articles look and feel like BuzzFeed articles - Ability to work with BuzzFeed on special formats like quizzes - Monetization" And no chance of disabling tracking...

eva1984 11y ago

Another attempt to make Facebook's own Flipboard.

tyho 11y ago

Facebook wants to become the internet, and federate access to external material. No doubt that these "instant articles" will be free to access under internet.org and competing news outlets are suddenly put at a massive disadvantage.

brown9-2 11y ago

A bit ironic: instantarticles.fb.com is a CNAME to fbinstantarticles.wordpress.com.

itsyogesh 11y ago
It still has the wordpress favicon.

wodenokoto 11y ago

From a Facebook business point and feature point of view this is a great move. One of Facebook's original strengths against MySpace was how orderly everything was organized. No crazy gifs and insane colorschemes, no large backgrounds that had to load from photobucket. Of course there was also unlimited photo upload. I know a lot of politicians in Denmark use their Facebook profile for official comments on news matter and politics and I am sure a lot of them will be pleased to be able to publish more in depth material. Users will also be pleased with the certainty of the shape of the material. No pop-up, long loading time or noisy ads. Judging from buzz feeds response I am however surprised by the gutsy move to ask publishers to host content on Facebook without even offering a monetization plan!

p3rp3rtu41 11y ago

Facebook is not my desired source of news. The use case I had for Facebook is based upon it's original premise. Connecting with Friends, seeing what they are up to, where they are and sharing photos. They are littering their platform with features that further dilutes the experience that everyone used to like/love. I despise seeing Buzzfeed and clickbait titles on the site. This is not the content I want to consume here. How can they get this so wrong??

untog 11y ago
Because you aren't the average user. They do want this content, judging by the amount they click on it.
spdionis 11y ago
The original premise was actually finding girls. When I read your second sentence I actually thought you meant that.

emodendroket 11y ago

Participating in this seems unwise for publishers but I agree with everyone saying from Facebook's point of view this is smart.

edge17 11y ago

Does it also support ad placement? The "10x faster" is otherwise meaningless, since much of the weight of content on those partner sites undoubtedly comes from loading ads.

sparkzilla 11y ago

This is a trap for publishers. You only have to look at how Facebook treated small businesses. We built up 4000 fans on our fan page (in the meantime helping FB grow) then FB throttled access to them, making us pay to reach our own fans. FB cannot be trusted.