Facebook Continues Takeover Of Internet With Instant Articles

Facebook Continues Takeover Of Internet With Instant Articles

Facebook announced yesterday a new feature called “Instant Articles”.

What is it? When viewing your newsfeed on mobile, instead of clicking a news link that takes you to the source website (away from Facebook) causing, on occasion, excessive load times, the click will “instantly” slide the complete article into view.

Publishers who sign up – right now it’s just a few like Buzzfeed and the NY Times – will place and host their content on Facebook. Publishers can also place their own ads in the story or use Facebook Ads (30% Facebook/70% publisher split), and format as they wish.

Basically, it’s creating a Facebook version of their web story.

The goal for publishers is they can better monetize and reach that billion plus Facebook audience as their content will be more clickable and shareable. And for some publishers, their stories will be perfectly formatted to mobile. Yes, publishers would lose clicks to their web properties, but gain views and shares via Facebook, begging the question, does it matter anymore where your story gets read?

The goal for Facebook is to make money off those articles via ads, keep users on their site via a better, faster mobile experience and add more options for their user base – why go anywhere else on the internet other than Facebook, which now has hosted news articles!

Or is all this simply a trap, as Admiral Ackbar famously said. Once Facebook hooks you in, they control the space, they can adjust the ad split and they can throttle the reach.

But if successful, will publishers just forego creating websites opting for a lone Facebook presence, producing more and more clickbait-y headlines? Some probably already are. Years and years ago people thought AOL was the internet. Sounds like Facebook is trying to follow that same path.

The new feature is only available on mobile IOS devices right now with expansion into Android soon.

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