(2017-04-16) Facebooks Instant Articles Promised To Transform

Facebook's Instant Articles promised to transform journalism — but now big publishers are fleeing

the arrival of Instant Articles in the spring of 2015 was presented as a cause for celebration

Though the format would have important financial consequences for the companies used it, generating revenue for publishers was not a primary goal in its development. "The team is legitimately motivated by making great articles," Matas told me in 2015. One former employee familiar with the matter said media companies' business models had initially been all but an afterthought

But two years after it launched, a platform that aspired to build a more stable path forward for journalism appears to be declining in relevance. At the same time that Instant Articles were being designed, Facebook was beginning work on the projects that would ultimately undermine it.

About 80 percent of publishers’ initial requests to the company involved direct ad sales, she said in an interview last week. Facebook agreed to the proposal: Publishers could keep 100 percent of the revenue of any ads they sold themselves, or 70 percent of the revenue if they wanted Facebook to sell the ads for them.

"In the beginning, having access to Instant will provide a huge advantage over publications that don’t," wrote John Herrman, whose Content Wars series in The Awl had warned publishers that Facebook would ultimately change the terms of any deal to benefit itself. "Eventually, publishers’ numbers will even out as competition increases."

Instant Articles had simply replaced one kind of view with another, less profitable one.

It found that not one publisher reported earning more money through Instant Articles than they did through their own properties. “We make less money on Instant Articles than we do on mobile web, which is probably everyone’s experience,” said Bill Carey, director of audience development at Slate.

Now publishers are turning their attention elsewhere. Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project borrows elements from Instant Articles while giving publishers more control