Instant Articles divides opinion
While many publishers have signed up to the new initiative, some are concerned about losing ad revenues and data control
While many publishers have signed up to Facebook’s initiative, some are concerned about losing ad revenues and data control.
Facebook’s launch of the Instant Articles mobile platform is the latest play by the world’s biggest social network to become more sticky and attractive to its users.
The move has raised fears that Facebook is looking to gain the whip hand over publishers and will squeeze their ad revenues, control their data and make their platforms irrelevant.
Nine publishers have signed up to Instant Articles, which allows Facebook users to read articles directly in their mobile News Feeds without clicking out of the social net
work. The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Bild and BuzzFeed are among those that are taking part. The
Guardian says: “It is great to see Facebook trialling new ways for quality journalism to flourish on mobile.”
But is this a Faustian pact? The terms of the deal may seem attractive now but the worry is that, as time goes by, Facebook will end up owning the publishers’ relationships with their mobile readers.
Facebook has gone some way to allaying some initial concerns, according to Malcolm Coles, Telegraph Media Group’s director of digital media in the UK. If publishers do not want to cede sales control, they can keep all the revenue from ads they run on Instant Articles and 70 per cent of revenue from Facebook ads that run on the articles. Furthermore, Facebook is allowing the integration of analytics code so that publishers can claim traffic to the pages as their own.
But Coles cautions that the terms could change if Instant Articles becomes a success. “It’s early days,” he says. “Facebook has a history of encouraging brands to do things then change the terms, which means companies don’t get so much value.”
He points to the social network reducing the organic reach of posts on brand pages during the past two years, forcing companies to pay for advertising. Coles is unaware of any negotiations for the
Telegraph to join in the trial but thinks there is little commercial pressure to sign up. “Ad rates on mobile are very low. Publishers have huge mobile traffic but it is quite hard to monetise,” he says. “The commercial pressure isn’t necessarily there to take part.”
However, he accepts that it could become inevitable given Facebook’s reach on mobile. In addition, there are questions about whether future ABC figures would include Facebook views.
Dennis Publishing’s chief technology officer, Paul Lomax, says: “At first glance, like many publishers, we would have concerns about data leakage.” He expressed reluctance to share data that is valuable to Dennis and its advertisers.
“One concern being talked about in the industry is whether Facebook may penalise publishers who do not sign up or boost those who do to the detriment of others,” Lomax continues. “For publishers who depend on social, this could result in a big loss of traffic and would raise questions about net neutrality.”
Meanwhile, the editor-inchief of The Weather Channel, Neil Katz, who had previously worked for AOL’s
Huffington Post, says Instant Articles is reminiscent of AOL’s ‘ walled garden’ approach to publishers in the 90s and early 2000s. That strategy failed partly because the wilderness of the web outside the AOL ‘garden’ was far more appealing to users than the garden itself.
Writing in Fortune magazine, Mathew Ingram said that Facebook is trying to sell the partnership as a mutual exchange of goods, “driven by the company’s desire to help publishers make their articles look as good as possible and reach more readers. But whenever you have an entity with the size and power of Facebook, even the simplest of arrangements becomes fraught with peril, and this is no exception. Why? Because a single player holds all of the cards in this particular game. And that player is Facebook”.
He adds: “The part of this deal that makes it a classic Faustian bargain is that Facebook arguably gets more from the arrangement than publishers do. How could that be, when it is giving away all the revenue? Because Facebook doesn’t really care about the revenue from ads around news content (although I expect most partners will take the 70 per cent deal, if not now then later, because Facebook is better at selling ads). What Facebook wants is to deepen and strengthen its hold on users.
“In that sense, news content is just a means to an end. And the risk is that if it stops being an effective means to that end, then Facebook will lose interest in promoting it. But in the meantime, Facebook will have solidified its status as the default place where millions or possibly even billions of people go to get their news. In other words, it will still own the land, and who farms which specific patch of that land is irrelevant.”
However, Matt Kapko, writing in CIO Perspectives, said: “Facebook is starving for professionally- produced media, and publishers are desperate to reach people who abandoned them for social sites, so Facebook’s Instant Articles could be a good thing for the company, its publisher partners and consumers.”