Facebook rolled out something called Instant Articles today, and if you haven't seen the details yet, the pitch is simple: instead of linking out to a publisher's site (which loads slow, is covered in ads, sometimes crashes your phone browser), the article loads instantly, right inside the Facebook app itself. Nine publishers signed on for the launch: the New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel, and Bild. That's a real lineup, not some also-ran group of blogs nobody reads.
And I get why they did it. Facebook says load times drop from an average of something like 8 seconds down to basically instant. Anyone who's tapped a link on their phone at a coffee shop with bad wifi knows exactly what problem they're solving. I'm not going to pretend mobile web reading doesn't suck a lot of the time, because it does. I've thrown my phone on the couch out of pure frustration waiting for a single article to render its ad stack before the text even shows up.
But I've been doing this blog since November 2011, and every time a big platform offers publishers a shortcut like this one, I get a little twitchy. Handing your content directly to Facebook's servers, formatted their way, monetized on their terms (word going around is a 70/30 ad split if Facebook sells the ads, and publishers keep 100% if they sell their own) means Facebook now owns the reading experience. Not just the discovery, which they already mostly own if we're being honest about how people find articles now, but the actual page the reader is looking at while they read it.
Small aside: this is basically what happened with RSS readers a few years back, except backwards. Google killed Reader in 2013 and everyone scattered to Feedly and Twitter links and whatever else was around, and RSS traffic to independent blogs like this one never really recovered from it. Now the story is publishers voluntarily walking their traffic into somebody else's walled garden because the alternative, a slow ad-choked mobile site, is that much worse. I don't think that's a coincidence, honestly. Publishers spent years loading their sites down with autoplaying video and pop-up interstitials and sticky headers that eat half the screen, and now the fix for the mess they made themselves is to just give up the site entirely.
I'm not signing techpad up for anything like this, for what it's worth, mostly because nobody's offered and also because I like owning my own domain and my own database. That's not a knock on the Times or National Geographic, who have actual business reasons to chase reach wherever it happens to be. It's just not the trade I'd want to make even if somebody handed it to me.
The thing that gets me is the framing. Facebook's announcement talks about giving readers "a fast, immersive Instant Articles experience," which is the kind of sentence that means nothing on its own but sounds nice enough that nobody questions it. Fast, sure, fine. Immersive is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What it actually means is the article now lives inside the Facebook app, with Facebook's native video player, Facebook's comment threads if the publisher opts in, and Facebook's own data on exactly how far down the page you scrolled before you got bored and swiped back to your feed.
I'll be curious whether this stays a boutique thing with nine partners for a year while everyone watches the ad numbers, or whether it opens up fast. My guess, and it's only a guess, is it grows slowly and then a couple years from now nobody remembers there was ever a debate about it, the same way nobody argues anymore about whether embedding a YouTube video instead of hosting your own was some kind of compromise. It was, once. Now it's just how video works on the internet.
If you're reading this on the actual techpad site and not through somebody else's feed or app, thanks for coming here directly. It's a dying habit and I appreciate it more than you'd think.