If consumers’ embrace of the format was easy to predict — who enjoys waiting for a website to load? — publishers’ feelings about Instant Articles were harder to gauge. The run-up to launch was met with tremendous anxiety among some publishers as they grappled with two realities: one, the majority of their audience is consuming news on Facebook; and two, allowing Facebook to host their articles directly meant giving up some control over their appearance and the ads that could run inside them. More than one publisher worried Facebook’s end game was to get publishers "hooked" on the format and then demand an ever-growing share of their ad revenue.
But so far, Facebook has taken the opposite approach. When publishers asked to be able to include more ads per article, Facebook let them. In March, it enabled video advertising; a week later, it allowed publishers to share sponsored posts as Instant Articles. In short order, Instant Articles became a model for the industry, with Apple and Google quickly stepping in to offer content hosting solutions of their own.
FACEBOOK'S GROWING POWER HAS RAISED NEW QUESTIONS
But Facebook remains the dominant player in the game — and its growing power in the distribution of news has raised new questions. In December, I posed the idea that Facebook ought to take responsibility for making its users more informed. The company reached out to me afterward, and I suggested we discuss the subject on Instant Articles' anniversary. Facebook set me up with Will Cathcart, a six-year veteran who oversees product management of the News Feed.
The timing was fortuitous: a controversy over what news goes into Facebook's Trending Topics feature dominated headlines in the days before our interview. (If you want highlights from that, I've helpfully aggregated myself here.) Trending Topics is overseen by Tom Stocky's search team, not the News Feed team, but Cathcart was able to clarify for me how it works.
The result is a chat that finds Facebook committed to minimizing editorial oversight over news products. In some ways, this marks a retreat. The company hired a managing editor in 2012, but he left a year later, saying: "Facebook is meant to sort of fade into the background. When Facebook starts producing content, it takes you away from that mindset." At the same time, Facebook acknowledges that journalism is one of the primary reasons people return to the News Feed each day. And it turns out the company is committed, in a way, to making its users feel "informed" — though in this context, what "informed" means remains very much open to interpretation.
Casey Newton: It’s been a year since Instant Articles launched, triggering a rush to off-platform distribution for some of the biggest media companies in the world. How is it going so far, from Facebook’s perspective? What have you learned?
Will Cathcart: A year in, the thing we’re really excited about is one, it really works to improve the experience. We announced at F8 some of the stats around this: for people who see enough Instant Articles in their feed, they’re 20 percent more likely to go read an Instant Articles than an identical article hosted on the mobile web. Because they’ve learned the experience is so much faster and richer. For people who click on Instant Articles, they’re 70 percent less likely to bounce. And then I think, coolest of all, people who read an Instant Articles are 30 percent more likely to share it with their friends. So from that perspective it’s going really well.
The other thing we were really focused on from the beginning is, how do we do this in a way that works for publishers? We knew publishers weren’t going to take the time to adapt their content to Instant Articles unless it worked for their business. And there I think we’ve done really well — we’re seeing lots of publishers coming onto Instant Articles. We went to completely open sign-ups at F8, and have seen a ton of momentum after that. All along, we’ve focused on listening to publishers about where Instant Articles was working for them and where it wasn’t, so we’ve made a bunch of changes throughout the course of the year.
This post was written by: Raymond Jack
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