Facebook and Apple hit snags with news publishing strategies
For Apple, it seems that publishers have yet to see any increased benefits traffic to their own sites, or any additional money generated via ads running alongside articles hosted through Apple’s News app. Ads are something of a necessary evil when it comes online publishing. While Facebook’s new publishing platform, Instant Articles, has had some success with reaching and engaging users, the ad restrictions placed on its 20 initial publishers have proven problematic.
Facebook is supposedly thinking hard about the ad regulations on the Instant Articles platform, according to a Wall Street Journal report last week. Currently, Instant Articles only allows a single large banner ad per 500 words–a far cry from the high-dollar ads that appear on publisher websites. Unsurprisingly, in a world where ad-blockers kill websites, publishers are pushing back.
Early number indicate that engagement is high and that user experience is better on mobile using Instant Articles than it is on your average mobile-friendly publisher website. Instant Articles (IA) lets publishers tap Facebook’s massive audiences faster and with better engagement and retention, but the problem is that the ad revenue on Instant Articles pales in comparison to what publishers can achieve on their own website. Without the interference of ad-blockers, anyway.
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