Subscribe
Sign in
Instant Articles — Tool for creating fast, interactive articles on Facebook
28
Replies
I'm interested how this tech works. I would assume publishers would not need to re-publish their content on FB. Instead they would implement certain markup in the original article for Facebook parser extract structured content and display it as Instant Article. Can someone confirm or deny it?
@nikitakorotaev Appears so: "Essentially, the social network reads special tags coded into the story to reformat it, but refers back to the underlying link so that reading it counts as a mobile web view and the viewer can easily share the article with people outside Facebook"
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
Good time to revisit similar efforts from AOL and MSFT in the past. The question is, what's different this time and does it matter? h/t to @abrams http://dashes.com/anil/2007/10/r...
This is interesting to see how world slowly shifts into the economies of medians, when there is so much noise going around that you have to have a powerful median filtering it and delivering content, existed for pictures of cats within fb feed and now for news with fb instant articles.
This is really smart, facebook. Does this mean twitter will now rush to make something similar? Because startups have been rushing to copy their competitors lately, and the results are just ugly.
@v4violetta personally this kind of awesome content would work better for me on Twitter :)
@v4violetta @bramk I agree. I tend to use Facebook more on the web, but Twitter on mobile. And Twitter generally has more links and articles in the feed.
What is the incentive for content creators to participate in this?
As a Buzzfeed I wouldn't be to keen on giving up my carefully designed 'recommended articles' and sharing buttons?
Looks like it's great for the user, not so great for publishers - fewer people pushed to their website - unless FB is willing to do a healthy ad-share.
Also, if this becomes big, another example of FB gradually eating Google's lunch.
@pieterpaul Fb gets you distribution just by its sheer size, although they say they're not weighing any more than regular articles. Publishers keep 100% of the ad revenue they sell, and 70% if Facebook sells it for you.
@pieterpaul actually, from what the reports say, it's going to be faster due to auto-caching; the traffic will still be attributed to the publisher (in ComScore); GA will be integrated; Ad revenues 100% & 70% for own sell/fb see resp.
I think it makes a lot of sense.
"Hey publishers, we took your content and made it 10x faster. You're welcome." —Facebook
As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. People share a lot of [news] articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.
Facebook 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.
Coverage.
I think this is similar to Snapchat Discover, right? And Paper app is now dead with this? I think Facebook will move the best parts of Paper into this product soon.
That's why Facebook acquired PushPopPress and people behind Medium design.
Think more about the future. Facebook maybe will create a platform or a plugin that syncs between Facebook Instant Articles and Website Articles and make better in-app reading for mobile users. And the users can use this tool to create their own stories.
This is a big deal for news industry. And many news apps, blog platforms and Google must be scared of.
@hoandesign I feel the same way about it being Facebook's take on Snapchat Discover. I'm curious to see if they focus on shorter length content at launch or a variety.
While I love Paper too @solenema, have to agree with @hoandesign - it's probably going to die soon.
I think Facebook used it very smartly for a research purpose, and will bring the best things over to the main app. (remember the sounds *pop*, already in the Facebook app)
This is a big deal, is there any useful link to see how this all work behind ?
I just had my first NYT Instant Article show up in my mobile feed. Amazing.
Beautiful design. The fonts are great, the videos were great. Obviously, there's a real cost to making all content that involved, but when that level of thought and detail can be given to an article, it's miles ahead of the other content in your feed.
Very curious how this pans out! It's a great experiment but have to wonder if users even notice at the end of the day. I'm sure Facebook will be loudly telling us if it does well.
Lots of folks nervous about the implications in the future, like if Facebook decides to take a bigger cut suddenly, but for now, it seems like a good choice. :-)
David Carr wrote my feelings more eloquently than I could have ever done:
"For publishers, Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/2...
@ow as a former social games pm (Playfish) I've seen it all before, IMHO this kind of platform play of fb will end with lots of frustrated publishers.
No complimentary incentives - both parties need more engagement - is asking for trouble in the longer term.
Lydia