Facebook Instant Articles: Is it Goodbye to Online Publishing as We know it?

There’s been a lot of hype over it but finally Facebook’s Instant Articles is here. Instant Articles allows publishers to post their content directly to Facebook instead of using links.  Some seem to think that this new move equates to selling your soul to the social media giant. Given Facebook’s history of constantly the ground rules, the growing fear is that while the initial offers from Facebook on Instant Articles is good, once publishers are reliant on the new practice, the other shoe will drop. It is widely expected that Facebook will alter the deal once it has become a key part of publishers’ overall strategy, and that publishers will have no choice but to simply pray that Facebook doesn’t alter it any further.

How Instant Articles works?

Instant Articles translates publisher content via HTML and RSS into good looking, easy to consume content, and made available direct on Facebook. There’s also a range of additional publishing options to the new platform to boost the presentation of content in the News Feed, things like auto-play video and interactive maps, all of which will function smoothly within Facebook’s mobile news feed. At the moment, Instant Articles is only available on the Facebook mobile app – trying to access the same content on your desktop PC will take you to the normal, mobile web version of the article.

Instant Article posts load much faster than normal links and that is one of the major pain points Facebook seeks to resolve with this option. It takes around eight seconds for an external link to load on mobile.  Now, that seems like nothing, right? Eight seconds isn’t long to wait for an article to come up, but on a wider scale, when you consider how many people are using Facebook each day that time is significant. Facebook has 936 million daily active users, if each of those users opens just one link per session, that eight seconds load time equates to more than two million total hours that people around the world are waiting, each day, for posts to load - time those people could be spending doing other things, like reading more content on Facebook. From that perspective alone, Facebook’s move pay-offs big time.

How do publishers make money?

One of the biggest concerns about publishers posting first-run content direct to Facebook was that they will be trading their own audience for Facebook’s. If people no longer need to visit your site to view your content, it will result in less traffic, and by extension, less opportunity to monetize your audience. In a bid to alleviate this, Facebook offers publishers the ability to display their own ads within their Instant Articles, with all revenues from any such ads going back to the publishers. Facebook will then fill any unsold ad spots, and will take a 30 per cent cut from any revenues generated by those ads, with the rest going back to the publishers.

Facebook has also worked with ComScore to make sure that any views on Instant Articles within Facebook’s app will count as traffic for the original publisher, not Facebook. So while publishers are ceding control to The Social Network, they’re getting a pretty good deal on advertising and losing nothing in audience stats. Facebook will also provide performance data on Instant Articles, which will help publishers to work out what resonates best with their audience and improve on them.

What’s the Downside with Instant Articles?

The problem with Facebook’s new option is not what Instant Articles are now, but what they may become. Major players posting direct to Facebook is a fundamental shift in the publishing process. Right now, the deal looks good, and it seems as though Facebook has done a lot of negotiating with their launch partners to ensure the deal benefits everyone, but as with the many changes to the News Feed algorithm, Facebook has the right to change the game whenever it sees fit.

If publishers don’t sign up to Instant Articles, will that see eventually their content de-emphasized by the algorithm, making it harder to reach potential audience on the platform? If Instant Articles are given preferential placement in the News Feed, will that further reduce the reach of all other content as there’ll be less News Feed space remaining as a result? If Instant Articles are a big hit, and publishers become heavily dependent on that as a new source of revenue, will Facebook change the advertising split, leaving publishers with no choice but to take the hit and give over more money to the social giant?

Obviously, there’s no way of knowing how it will all pan out, but it’s generally agreed that building a reliance on ‘rented land’, in social networks or any other platform of which you don’t control the back-end, is never good in the long term. But maybe Facebook is, as they say, only seeking to improve user experience. Maybe eliminating that load time results in more people spending more time visiting other areas of Facebook or direct posted articles further enhance Facebook’s status as a key source of information, increasing time spent on platform, and thus, opportunities for Facebook to serve ads, and that, in itself, should be enough reason for Facebook to maintain the system as is. Only time will tell. The initial prospects are appealing though. I mean, how many publishers do you know out there who wouldn’t jump at the chance of having access to the over 1.4 billion users of Facebook?