Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
RSS readers solved this problem a long time ago.
And, no, I don't feel guilty - I might have felt guilty if I only paid for ads with my attention (I'm not sure though - I don't feel guilty ignoring the ads on a print newspaper). But allowing ads through means you give 20 or so organizations with questionable ethics complete info about your web use, including (but not limited) to when and what -- and those 20 organizations sell that info to the highest bidder. No, I don't feel guilty at all.
And facebook is one of those questionable ethics organizations I mentioned. The mere existence of a "Like" button (whether you click it or not) in 99.99% of the cases already gives facebook all the info about your surfing habits.
It's activated by clicking the icon or by using a keyboard shortcut (cmd+shit+x). So there is at least one single way to close any overlay on any website.
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?
I'm pretty sure Facebook knows about this, it seems like a platform lockin play.
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...
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!
Isn't it good for the writers? More people viewing the content?
Isn't it good for the users? A better experience?
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.
It's intriguing to think of this in the context of Plato's _Republic_. A simplistic conception of the philosopher-king might interpolate the positive relationship between knowledge and justice, and argue that the more knowledge one can obtain of reality, the better a leader one would be. Such a leader would seek out every metric available, right? But, as in the Allegory of the Cave [1], where people might become very skilled at interpreting shadows but never recognize the true Form of the hidden objects casting the shadows, metrics are only good when they convey the Truth... which, in the case of publication quality, may indeed be that justice is ill-served by journalistic pandering, and that metrics are inherently short-term.
Of course, Plato was also an advocate of censorship in the very same work [2], so any reading should be taken with a grain of salt. It's very interesting, though, that the idea of an "uncanny valley" of knowledge, of wrongly optimizing on a subset of the Truth, is an idea millennia old.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/republic/#SH1c
Facebook has set a trap, and is baiting readers and writers with some short term gains. At the long term, the only party that this is good for is Facebook itself.
That said, it's doomed to happen, sooner or later. I really don't know what to think about those initiatives anymore. Maybe what's important is that we keep an open internet, not that we keep the Internet open.
Users - I'd rather not get my information from facebook.
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??
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Facebook's ad engine is the closest one to the Facebook social graph. Facebook's argument may be valid that ads on the articles served by Facebook will convert better.
That 30% might be made up by not paying a 3rd-party ad engine's commissions, plus the increased effectiveness of Facebook's ads.
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.
So, this works because Facebook makes native content more prominent than linked content, which is filtered out.
70% of a big number is more than 100% of a small number?
> 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.