Facebook, on Wednesday, launched its much-rumoured product “Instant Articles”, a programme that directly host articles from news organizations so that users do not have to click out and wait for websites to load. The firm has tied up with nine media companies - The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild - for Instant Articles, which would be available on iPhone to start with.
“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 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 said in a blog post. “Instant Articles lets them deliver fast interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models,” Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said.
Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep all the revenue or allow Facebook to sell ads, with the social network getting 30 per cent of the proceeds. Publishers will also have the ability to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools.
According to the New York Times, Facebook clearly plays an important role as a gatekeeper to news. Nearly half of American Internet users said they got news about politics and government on Facebook during the course of a week, almost as many as got such news from local television, it said quoting a survey last year by the Pew Research Center.
NYT also quoted Vivian Schiller, who advises media companies and brands, as saying publishers have little choice but to co-operate with Facebook. “That’s where the audience is,” Ms. Schiller said. “It’s too massive to ignore.” It also further said that Facebook’s role as a powerful distributor of news makes many people in the industry uneasy. The fear is that it could become more of a destination than their own sites for the work they produce, drawing away readers and advertising.
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