So Facebook did the thing on Wednesday where it announced it wants to just host everybody's articles directly inside the Facebook app, and call it Instant Articles. Nine publishers went live with it right out of the gate: the New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC News, The Atlantic, the Guardian, BBC News, and a couple of German outlets, Spiegel and Bild. The pitch is speed: Facebook's claiming these load up to ten times faster than a regular mobile web article, because the content lives on Facebook's own servers instead of pulling from whatever creaky CMS the publisher is running. Publishers can sell their own ads and keep all of it, or let Facebook sell the ads and keep 70%.
I get why the Times signed up. When your site gets enough mobile traffic through the Facebook app, and enough of that traffic bounces because your page takes four seconds to render around nine ad scripts, you start doing math about control versus speed pretty fast, and speed wins. I dont think theyre wrong to try it. Im just not signing up for the version of the internet where that becomes the default.
This blog's been running since November 2011, which is going on four years now, and the entire premise of it, dumb as it sounds to type out, is that its mine. Its on my own domain. If I want to redesign it at 1am on a Tuesday because Im annoyed at the sidebar, I can, and nobody has to approve that. Handing the actual words over to a platform so they load faster inside somebody else's app is a trade I get, financially, for a publication with a newsroom and a business model built around scale. For a one-person blog it's a different trade. Its not really speed for control, its speed for existence, because once your writing lives primarily as a format inside someone else's app, you're not really running a website anymore, you're running a Facebook page with extra steps.
And look, Im not pretending techpad loads instantly either. I know for a fact it doesnt: Ive got a sidebar widget pulling from an RSS aggregator that used to time out constantly around 2013 and I never fully fixed it, I just moved it lower on the page so it loads after everything else. Thats the actual state of independent web publishing for most of us: not "should I give my content to a giant platform for a faster load," its "I have not looked at my own site's source in eight months and Im scared to."
What gets me about Instant Articles specifically is the framing that this is good for publishers. Maybe! Ten of the biggest media brands on earth negotiated a deal with the biggest referral-traffic source on earth, and got favorable terms because they had leverage. Thats not really a template thats available to anyone smaller. If this format becomes the expectation over the next couple years — and Ive got no evidence it will, Im just saying if — the publishers who dont have a seat at that table dont get the same terms, they just get told the article format is unwelcome unless it fits Facebook's spec. Thats a very different thing than what's launching this week, which is nine partners on an opt-in pilot. Im not writing an obituary for RSS over one product announcement. Im just noting the shape of the thing.
Small aside because I cant help it: the New York Times' own reporting on this quoted Facebook people talking about how much they care about publisher relationships and open ecosystems, and I always find that language funny coming from a platform that changed its News Feed algorithm about six different times in the last two years in ways that tanked traffic for outlets that had built entire strategies around the previous version. "We care about your business" is doing a lot of work in a sentence from a company that owns the pipe.
Anyway. Nine big publishers, faster loads, a 70/30 ad split if you let Facebook sell for you. Worth watching where it goes over the summer. My RSS widget is still slow and Im still not fixing it tonight.