Fairfax Media teams up with Facebook as first local publisher on Instant Articles platform
Fairfax Media is the first local publisher to sign up to Facebook’s Instant Articles product, as the social media giant continues its global rollout of the publishing platform.
The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Stuff.co.nz announced a launch partnership with Facebook in Australia and New Zealand to use the platform meaning they will upload content directly to the site and look to monetise the audiences by selling display and pre-roll video ads there instead.
Some publishers have questioned the wisdom in displaying their content directly on Facebook rather than pulling readers through to their own sites, but others are hopeful of gaining incremental readers because of the mass-scale of the audience on the social network, and the faster loading times.
While both Buzzfeed and The Guardian have put Australian content on the platform as part of global deals, Fairfax is the first Australian-based business to sign up to it.
2010: “Facebook is absolutely no threat to us,” Jack Matthews
2015: “We now beg Facebook for work,” Fairfax Media
What do they say about people who keep doing the same thing and yet expect a different result? Plainly, the advertising value of content has fallen. Putting it in another channel does two things: devalues the brand and price and dissolves the value of the content at source.
At some point Hywood and his crowd will be burying their brands. It might not be a long time from now, as they’ve already done horrible damage to the value of the core product and this sort of stuff is very much like lemmings running for the cliff.
Just enough time to rack up another Masertai if he’s lucky