Quitting Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News: unravelling a Faustian pact
Two years ago, publishers fell into Faustian pacts with Facebook and Apple, with the promises of better traffic and ad dollars through off-platform distribution such as Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. Now as publishers are starting to retreat, Mumbrella’s Miranda Ward asks what have they learnt from jumping in with the tech giants?
Social media was once thought to be the key to distributing online content, but the missing piece of the puzzle has always been how to actually monetise it. So when Facebook launched its Instant Articles and Apple provided Apple News, it looked like a solution.
But clearly it has not.
Last week the industry saw The Guardian pull out of both while this week News Corp’s The Australian has called it quits on Apple News (it has never tried Facebook Instant Articles).
Both publishing companies blamed the poor revenue generated from the platforms.
They’re waking up, slowly.
I think this is unfairly critical of publishers. There is nothing wrong with experimenting with new distribution channels and for some this has no doubt tapped into new audiences and generated brand awareness.
I also don’t think it’s fair to assume that publishers were not investing in building their own platforms while at the same time seeing if the offerings from FB and Apple could provide audience growth and new revenue streams.
I agree @Glen –with some exceptions, most publishers have experimented quite cautiously and sensibly with Facebook IA and Google News, by publishing a subset of their content on these platforms to understand the impact on audience and revenues. The fact that numerous publishers (including some of their original launch partners, such as New York Times) are now pulling out simply reflects that for them, the experiment didn’t work. But the only way for them to know this was to try it. IMO publishers can and should keep experimenting — some of them will work, some won’t. But doing nothing is not an option.
With many quality outlets pulling out, they could learn from the experience and fashion a news aggregator servicing both ends of the political spectrum, and feed it out on a personalised basis. Unfortunately, they would be way behind in being able to track the requisite data and I don’t think facebook and Apple will give it to them. I’m still choosing my own news sites and articles because I want to, but I do wonder whether the fb faithful will be bothered looking outside to NYT, Guardian etc. Good piece.
Miranda your own article about The Australian pulling the pin on Apple News states “As of today, The Australian will only distribute a limited number of unrestricted, publicly available stories on Apple News” and then it goes on to quote Alice Bradbury from The Australian “…hope to work with them on subscriptions at scale as the Apple News product evolves.” So that sounds to me like they are far from quitting Apple News.
I couldn’t agree more Miranda. Publishers need to form a sound, long term strategy about how they are going to continue to produce quality content whilst monetising that content. Complete desperation, a want to be ‘first’ and lack of collaboration are just a handful of the many contributing factors as to how price has fallen through the floor. With all the market talk about transparency, you’d like to think some better practise across the industry will now start to take place.