facebook introduce instant article

[ethan11james]

now everyone can see the news article in face book feed new product for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. for more and detailed you can read at media.fb.com

[engine]

It's only on the iOS right now, and for a limited number of publishers.

This is a worrying trend and i suppose publishers have to give it a go before they decide it's sucking life out of their own properties.

Today we’re excited to introduce Instant Articles, a new product for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. Facebook Instant Articles for iPhone [media.fb.com]

Along with a faster experience, Instant Articles introduces a suite of interactive features that allow publishers to bring their stories to life in new ways. Zoom in and explore high-resolution photos by tilting your phone. Watch auto-play videos come alive as you scroll through stories.

acebook is working with nine launch partners for Instant Articles: The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.

[webcentric]

If this winds up being available to just any publisher, I could see it starting a completely new era in publishing. If this can be monetized by the publisher as the article suggests, who needs a website? I can see whole operations springing up based solely on this platform. I guess the question is whether this will be available to all publishers eventually or whether (like Google) only the fat cats are going to get decent exposure.

[Robert Charlton]

Fascinating development, in many ways a brilliant move by Facebook... and yes, lots of possibilities for changing the publishing landscape. I agree about the potential new era in publishing.

Many upsides for publishers. The platform is designed from the ground up for the venue and for the web, to provide a potentially stunning rich-media experience, preloaded for speed (including all those ads the newspapers run, and the social connections wired into Facebook) and designed for monetization and engagement. Publishers get to keep the ad revenue for ads they sell on the stories, are free also to run the stories on their own sites, and Facebook will be sharing its data with them.

Huge potential audience, which I think that Facebook is demonstrating it can target extremely well. In my own FB surfing, some of the most compelling news selections I'm encountering are in the related stories on my News Feed... sponsored news stories that Facebook's algorithm has selected as related to stories that my FB Friends have shared. Some of these recent FB recommendations have been uncannily right on. Facebook gives me a feedback button to tune its selections, so if they're getting it wrong, they should learn about it quickly.

I can imagine that with a platform as good as this one promises to be, this is going to be a very powerful publishing and advertising platform. These new Facebook "living pages", as someone described them, are way, way ahead of the old Google News page flip view (whatever they called it) from several years back, which now seems embarrassingly lame in comparison. Facebook has gone for something that uses the strongest interactive features of the web... not tried to remind us that once upon a time we read this stuff on paper and turned pages.

To get a sense of what that presentation is going to be like, check out this Facebook preview article and three-minute video, which are very well done. This is the only preview material I've seen thus far, and the glimpses are impressive....

Instant Articles
http://instantarticles.fb.com/ [instantarticles.fb.com]

A new way for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook.

One of the things I wondered when I saw the list of participating publishers... names like the NYT, National Geographic, NBC and The Atlantic... was "why do the need help?". The answer is in the platform that Facebook has come up with, which is the publishing platform in the right place at the right time.

I would not be surprised if much of the inspiration for the platform, if not also some of the personnel, came from Ev Williams' Medium.com, a web based publishing platform that has already influenced a lot of other web publishers and perhaps web journalism and design in general.

Making some guesses based on what I'm seeing in the above Instant Articles presentation, I can imagine that the platform itself includes JQuery-like libraries of routines that can be used to spice up elements in a page, create seamless transitions, and I'd expect that the features will evolve over time. If it's as good as I think it might be, it's going to add a lot of whistles and bells to the media that the publishers own but haven't yet really enhanced for presentation.

I think of these enhancement routines as effects modules. Keep in mind that Facebook has previously purchased Instagram, and I believe has retained its team... and most recently it has bought Oculus Rift... so presentation certainly looms large in FB's future.

It will be up to the publishers to retain substance without getting sidetracked by the eye-candy. The branding issue I'm sure will play a big part in the success of the platform... and the question is whether the success is large enough to benefit both Facebook and publishers. From what I've read, I sense that all of the parties involved understand this too.

[adguy4life]

This is a nightmare waiting to happen for publishers. Well, publishers like me who run websites that get good traffic but not HuffPo levels of traffic.

Obviously it removes control from the publisher. And with that comes the nightmare scenario: FB changes the rules of the game along the way. Those ad share percentages get stingier. FB changes other things to squeeze $$ out of you and into its pockets.

FB has a history of bait-and-switch and saying one thing and then doing something else down the road. We've seen what it has done with organic reach. My own organic reach plummeted over the past year, which has reduced the traffic per article to my website. A year ago, traffic per article to my website was 400% more than it is now - and that is with me nowadays working smarter, writing much better headlines, and producing better content. But with the slash of organic reach, the demise of traffic via FB cannot be avoided, unless one produces more content. And that's what I have done: I now produce 4 times as much content to get the same traffic as I did a year ago. And it's only going to get worse.

And that is why I don't trust Instant Articles. FB has a long history of changing the rules of the game to the detriment of everyone but itself. Fool me once, okay. Fool me twice, no thank you.

And that lame reason of web pages loading 10x faster makes me roll my eyes. No one visiting my site has ever complained about page load speed. Not to mention that page load speed is often determined by a person's cellular service. FB is really reaching to find reasons to justify its power/revenue grab when it lists the page load speed nonsense.

[romerome]

Has anyone heard anything about how people using instant articles are doing as far as ad revenue. A percent of how much it was up/down after implementing instant articles.

[Robert Charlton]

This recent article from Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard suggests that after some months of testing and discussion, Instant Articles is going to start rolling out in a much broader way....

Instant Articles get shared more than old-fashioned links
...plus more details from Facebook’s news push
"That's what we can do, as a platform: be really responsive to what publishers want out of us." Also coming up: A major move into international markets.
By Laura Hazard Owen - Oct. 26, 2015
[niemanlab.org...]

The article discusses some new features, the process of getting partners on board, and expanding the audience. All in all, it sounds like they're going for a very wide range of participation, and that FB will be working closely with publishers to get a good sense of how the audience interacts with these articles.

Particuarly fascinating, I find... the New York Times and Facebook are discussing the idea "that the concept of an "article" is outdated".

One of the things that we have done with Instant Articles is start to imagine how the individual pieces of media inside the article can break out and have a life of their own.

Instant Articles supports liking and commenting on photos and videos inside the article. Those photos and videos can then become stories themselves and show up in news feeds. If you go to BuzzFeed articles, for example, you see people are liking and commenting on individual photos there, and mentioning their friends, and talking about the items they see. We think that interaction is something that’s going to be really interesting.

[BarbaraFogg]

I have a question that is it available for all publishers or restricted to few specific one. I am looking for some innovative thing that I can do on facebook for getting more traffic on my pages. I also have read many articles and liked few.

[edited by: not2easy at 7:12 am (utc) on Oct 30, 2015]
[edit reason] Please Read TOS [/edit]

[tangor]

Me? I don't trust FB. I don't like their PC editorializing or their shutdown of diverse viewpoints. In that regard they are not "publishers" or "free press". For some this might work, but for all the rest it's a no start.

[romerome]

"PC editorializing or their shutdown of diverse viewpoints"

Yep the more facebook controls content the more worried I get about this.