Facebook to Allow Any Publisher to use Instant Articles From April 12

[engine]

Facebook's Instant Articles will be opened up to any publisher from April 12.

This is Facebook hosted content, and when it was first announced in 2015 [webmasterworld.com].

This is one way Facebook can keep people on its site - why go anywhere else if all the content you require is in one place.

From a publisher point of view, monetisation is going to be of interest. I can really see the appeal for smaller publishers.

With Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network. Additionally, publishers can use their existing web-based analytics systems to track article traffic or use third-party providers. They can do all this while accessing a rich suite of multimedia tools to create dynamic, interactive stories, that will load quickly everywhere on Facebook, regardless of where in the world their readers are. Facebook to Allow Any Publisher to use Instant Articles From April 12 [media.fb.com]

[instantarticles.fb.com...]

[shri]

So, basically wordpress / blogger - free and on steroids?

Am I missing the downside of this other than not being able to use my own domain?

[blend27]

IMHO the word "Articles" was invented and abused by by bunch of "....." people. We had Blue Widget Articles SEOs creating user names on forums like SEO-GOD-India, SEO-Prime-etc... and such. Publishing Articles became a click bait bonanza in earlier ages of the web. The fact that all these big companies keep going after Articles is still a click/tittle bonanza, not sure why though. It is all SPAM, waist of user's time.

[added]
Have you seen The latest best Articles Wiki Blog lately? It is missing user comments.

[Selen]

In the long term, isn't publishing 'articles' on Facebook the same as investing your time, talents, and money into renovating your landlord's apartment?

[shri]

In the long term, isn't publishing 'articles' on Facebook the same as investing your time, talents, and money into renovating your landlord's apartment?

Perhaps not apartment, but a rental business premises on which you pay no rent?

Free platform, you can bring your own ads and analytics.

Like I said, I'm not sure what I'm missing - other than what will be the obvious Facebook throttling and introduction of a promote this article button.

[Selen]

I mentioned 'long-term.' What would happen if you want to move to a different location ('business facility') - you'd be still required to redirect your customers to FB brand or you could have your content hosted directly on your own domain? If the latter one, how would Google index it (would Google even index such FB instant articles)?

[sampendleton]

This Facebook Instant Articles has something to do with Google's AMP.
But I wonder if it would be on a different application like fb messenger?
Because I'm sure it'll definitely occupy some space on my device.

[FattyB]

Turkeys and Christmas....

What you might see is publishers putting duplicate stuff on FB IA and maybe no index it. I mean you'd need to be mental long term to put all your content on some platform you have no control of and which probably messes up all your licensing. Also I note FB says direct sales but loads of medium and large publishers use 3rd party agencies to do all the ad sales, not sure they will run on this.

[coachm]

FattyB, tons of "business" people place their long form posts on LinkedIn. I agree it's nuts, and many don't have the desire, or skills to run their own site, except a few on Wordpress (same deal really since they have to rely on them). There's a fair number of LinkedIn posters unhappy that it's no longer the case that all their followers get notified on new articles, and I expect they'll try Fbook.

I'll look at it. Post a few of my articles that are older from my sites, or newer but not on my sites, etc. Repurposed.

[Robert Charlton]

So, basically wordpress / blogger - free and on steroids?

Am I missing the downside of this other than not being able to use my own domain?

shri, back in the first announcement, I saw lots of potential upsides in this, both for FB and for the participating publishers...

facebook introduce instant article
May, 2015
https://www.webmasterworld.com/facebook/4746886.htm [webmasterworld.com]

In the original discussion, the large participating publishers were free to use their own domains as well, as noted here...

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.

The current announcement emphasizes the same attractive terms. Depending on the News Feed algo, though... if I'm understanding the model correctly... I'm thinking that exposure on Facebook isn't guaranteed to be free. As you note, FB is throttled... perhaps more of a potential downside for small publishers than for, say, National Geo or the NYT.

Your WordPress / blogger analogy might make it even a better deal for some, though I would think that content creators would also want an outside site, in order to be independent of the vicissitudes of the newsfeed.

Hard to say how the offer of ad revenue will affect writers from elsewhere. Medium again comes to mind, as something of a forerunner in long form content creation platforms, but one that currently runs no ads. I'm very curious to see how this arrangement affects the outside web eco-system.

For the content creator, the model is possibly similar in some ways to the top-rung guest blog model, where writers with sites of their own are nevertheless doing guest blogs or writing columns to extend reach... for exposure rather than for ad revenue... and thus one more base that might need covering.