The Wall Street Journal blog CMO Today reported that the Facebook’s Instant Articles partners are getting ready to crank out content. Here’s a quick rundown:
• New York Times – Plans to publish 30 articles a day. NYT will sell all of the ads running within the stories, rather than FB selling the ads, with the belief that they can get a similar rate for what they get on their own site.
• BuzzFeed – Pushing as much content as possible to Instant Articles while initially making those articles available only to a “select group of users” to study reactions.
• NBC – 30-40 articles per day. No word on advertising.
• The Atlantic – Almost all of its content will be available on Instant Articles. They’ve already lined up AMC science-fiction series Humans as an advertiser for their Instant Articles.
Facebook debuted Instant Articles last month as a feature for publishers to provide content directly to Facebook to host within its mobile app. According to Facebook, this is beneficial for publishers because they can decrease the article load times.
So what are these publishers getting in return for giving their content to Facebook to host within its app?
“It’s all about control of your audience,” Amol Sharma of the Wall Street Journal said in the video below. “So you have to make a decision if you’re a media company. This is going to play out on the Facebook mobile app. Well, that is a huge and growing audience for every media company. So do you really want to turn over control of that audience to a third-party company as powerful as Facebook? The data on who is reading your articles and who is reading other newspapers’ articles, who will control that? How much will Facebook share with you of that information? Those are questions that executives at all of these companies have to consider when deciding to do one of these deals.”
Tiffany L. Rider 