Publishers want Facebook to make ad changes with Instant Articles

Dive Brief:

• Facebook is still working out the ad revenue kinks with its Instant Articles publisher partners.


• The app, which went live for Apple devices last month, hosts publishers’ content rather than sending traffic back to their websites and comes with restrictive advertising policies set by Facebook.


• According to the Wall Street Journal, insiders say publishers aren’t generating as much revenue from Instant Article ads as they do on their own websites.

Dive Insight:

Facebook is likely going to have to reconsider some its restrictive advertising guidelines on its Instant Articles app after its publisher partners are already pushing back. The guidelines include no “rich media” ads, and one banner ad of 320 x 250 pixels for every 500 words of content. Most publishers would run three or four of that sized ad for every 500 words.

The Washington Post was one publisher that went all in with Instant Articles, running its entire 1,200 daily articles and wire reports on the app. Jed Hartman, chief revenue officer at the Washington Post told the Wall Street Journal, “You have to analyze many factors to determine the monetization potential. You have fewer impressions per page view than we presently do, so you have to balance that, and you don’t have all the animation we can sell on our own site.”

In the same article WSJ Michael Reckhow, Facebook’s Instant Articles product manager, said, “It’s early days with Instant Articles, but one of our principles from the beginning has been to work collaboratively with our publishing partners to understand their needs and shape the product. We’re currently working closely with publishers to understand how their advertising in Instant Articles compares to the mobile web so we can deliver results, while maintaining a great reading experience for people. We’ve made numerous improvements to the advertising capabilities over the past few months and will continue to iterate based on publisher feedback to improve the product.”

Meanwhile, the NewsWhip shared early data on The New York Times’ performance on Instant Articles, revealing that stories on Instant Articles are three times more likely to be shared.

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Publishers want Facebook to make ad changes with Instant Articles

A Friendly Giant: How Facebook is Using Instant Articles to Woo Publishers - Business 2 Community

Facebook, always known to be a giant, is appearing increasingly friendly as of late.

To publishers (and advertisers), that is.

Whether the discussion is about social media, media in general, new avenues for publishing content, or anything else vaguely media-related – Facebook is likely to come up at some point. With a fifth of the world’s population logged on as active users, this is inevitable. These truths represent both great challenges and great opportunities for publishers and marketers.

To wit, Facebook has tinkered with the way they approach their relationships with large publishers of digital content. Seeking to improve their own user experience (we all prefer experiencing a platform when the content we’re scrolling through is high quality and interesting, after all) while deepening their lucrative ties with publishers, they have announced one of the most important of these changes: Instant Articles.

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Facebook Met Publishers on Their Terms

Basically, Instant Articles are News Feed-based spaces where publishers can post highly interactive multimedia “articles.” I use quotations because the tools Facebook is offering for building this type of content are indicative of far more stimulating experiences than merely reading a traditional newspaper article. Some of these features include colorful cinemagraph covers, autoplay videos, intensely colorful and easily zoomable photographs, and even interactive maps to give stories a geographic context. Clearly, these are meant to be engaged with on a deep level, something that both publishers and advertisers can get behind.

Facebook sees these as a momentous new development in the field of online publishing:

“Powerful new creative tools bring your stories to life. Instantly zoom into high-resolution photos and tilt to explore in detail. Watch autoplay video come alive as you scroll through the article. See where it all happened with interactive maps. Hear the author’s voice with embedded audio captions.”

The language is both bold and provocative, as are the digital tools they are describing. With Instant Articles, publishers can create a user experience that is equal parts evocative, informative, and unique to their brand. While some publishing giants were wary of going full bore into the new publishing platform, Facebook was able to entice nine major American and British publishing outlets: The New York Times, National Geographic, and BuzzFeed being the most often discussed of the bunch.

Facebook knew from the start that publishers would have concerns about the new strategy, largely stemming from directing their user experience away from their own websites and on to the Facebook News Feed. According to The New York Times (who, coincidentally are one of the publishers now on board), employees from The Guardian were the most hesitant, suggesting to peers at other outlets that “publishers should band together to negotiate deals that work for the whole industry, and should retain control of their own advertising.” It’s unclear whether such collusion was necessary, but one thing is clear: Facebook understood the concerns and went all out in alleviating them. In order to create a program that was too good for the publishers to pass up, Facebook took a number of measures.

1. Ad Revenue: Facebook is allowing publishers to keep 100% of the ad revenue if they sell their own ad space, and 70% of the ad revenues if they leave it up to Facebook to sell the ad space through their own network.


2. Final Cut: Facebook is also allowing publishers to have total control over what content is created and how it is displayed. As Contently puts it, “In essence, publishers can use Facebook Instant Articles as an alternative platform to deliver a superior experience for their readers coming from Facebook – all without sacrificing ad revenue.”


3. Front and Center: Facebook is still running the show, of course, and thus will be in control of how visible these ads remain. Once again, though, the motivating factor for them is an improved user experience. Therefore, they’ll likely be doing everything in their power to make the content publishers create appear early and often in users’ News Feeds, so as to satisfy the promises made in those agreements and also give users easy access to quality, visually stimulating content.

BuzzFeed is the publishing outlet widely deemed to be the most primed to succeed with the new format. Because their brand is built around engaging with content in shorter intervals with unique formats (quizzes, lists, etc.), the Instant Article platform will suit them well. Facebook has already assured them that Instant Articles will be a suitable platform for their varied approach to displaying and sharing content.

Publishers shouldn’t be the only group excited about this development, though. Advertisers should be making very careful note of how ad space will function with these tools. Whether buying ad space from the publishers directly or from Facebook (which, once again, would mean Facebook would get to keep 30% of those ad revenues), marketers and ad agencies should be salivating at the thought of these highly engaging and visible plots of digital real estate.

As Marketing Land points out, it’s becoming less and less common for publishers (no matter how large) to have large sales teams. Because of this, we may see publishers opt for the indirect advertising method, in which Facebook would be in control of the ad inventory. The 30% decrease in revenue collection could be potentially made up for by the ability to take advantage of Facebook’s advanced targeting methods. Also, marketers will be able to benefit from a new, “no-nonsense means of serving more trackable, targeted ads across high-value media properties.” In other words, marketers will benefit immensely from yet another innovative and highly specific method of targeting audiences through Facebook.

Formatting

In terms of formatting, the ads will have certain restrictions. Facebook has posted the following specifications for Instant Article ad units:

• 1 large banner ad, sized 320×250 or 300×250 pixels – or – 2 small banners sized 320×50 or 300×50 pixels for every 500 words of content


• A maximum of 4 total ads per article, and a maximum of 2 small banners per article.


• All articles are allowed to have at least one ad, regardless of the length.


• Publishers may include no more than one house ad per article.


• No ads may be placed “above the fold” on the first view of the article.


• Publishers may not include ads in autoplay videos embedded in their articles, although ads in third-party video players are allowed

It’s interesting to see these specifications as a window into the way Facebook sees themselves benefiting from these instant articles. It all comes down to user experience. So, when users are scrolling down their News Feeds and are confronted with an Instant Article, Facebook ensures that the ads included won’t be the first visible element. Also, they ensure that the ads will be useful, not merely a way for publishers to shill their content, at least not more than once per article. As consistency is part of the foundation on which UX is built, Facebook is making sure that videos aren’t preceded by ads. Since it’s asking more of a user to sit through a video than it is to simply see a written blurb, Facebook knows that this last specification will make the user more willing to engage with the high-quality video content.

Recap

Because it’s still such a new advertising platform, it will take some time to develop useful results metrics and best practices guidelines. Already though, ad space on Instant Articles is signaling a dramatic change in the way publishers and advertisers digitally interact. Ultimately, if Facebook doesn’t go back on the concessions made to publishers so far, (this is possible, of course, as Facebook can essentially do whatever it wants) the ability to advertise on Instant Articles represents huge brand building opportunities. Users will be met with Instant Articles in a highly visible (the format is exclusively mobile) and high quality (the examples so far are visually rich, easy to engage with, and varied in subject matter) content. How this changes in the future remains to be seen, but marketers, advertisers, and business alike should all be taking careful note of how it all shakes out.

A Friendly Giant: How Facebook is Using Instant Articles to Woo Publishers - Business 2 Community

How Facebook's Instant Articles may impact social

Kristina: What trends are you seeing in the social space?

Jordan Slabaugh, Vice President, Wayin: One of the trends we’re seeing is social media users increasingly turning to social platforms as their primary source for news. This trend is exemplified by Facebook working to better its own platform to allow users to share news in response to the growing demand for this consumption, and sharing, of news on social.

Additionally, brands are increasingly acting more like publishers. Consumers value timely, valuable content and consume this on social media where they spend a large portion of their personal time. Brands are maximizing their relevance and reach to target consumers by delivering that type of information. The most successful brands are creating a voice for themselves that relies on real-time moments in addition to planned campaigns.

Kristina: Manta recently reported that less than half of small businesses on Facebook are seeing significant ROI from their social strategy. What is holding up social engagement?

Jordan: What many businesses are missing is that ROI means more than engagement and that ‘social for social’ strategies that don’t integrate on-network content and trends across other channels only create siloed, ineffective marketing efforts. Social persuades. And to drive meaningful results, brands need to better understand their audience’s interests and behaviors, and then ultimately find opportunities to deliver the best social content to the right place at the right time. Many times that means not building out a “Facebook strategy” but rather finding conversations already taking place there are surfacing that content where it’s most impactful – a corporate website, a campaign microsite or an in-person screen at a live event.

Social media intelligence and marketing display solutions like Wayin allow businesses to discover and understand the best social media content in real time, and then act immediately by integrating that content larger marketing efforts in a persuasive way. Visual content is one of the most powerful ways to connect with consumers, and we continue to see the impact driven by combining social content with interactive, visual displays – to extend reach, activate audiences and even drive revenue. The opportunities for this are vast, ranging from a retailer displaying tweets about a new product on in-store screens to share product reviews with current shoppers to a hospitality brand running a loyalty campaign on its website where customers who engage socially are given loyalty perks.

Kristina: How do you see Facebook’s new ‘Instant Articles’ impacting the social space?

Jordan: Facebook’s launch of “Instant Articles” demonstrates a continued shift towards social media as an everyday source of relevant, valuable information. Consumers are increasingly turning to Facebook, Twitter and other social sites for breaking news updates, and Facebook is working to make it even easier for publishers to share informative, interactive news on the site. Facebook’s new feature makes content more readable and interactive across all devices by offering faster load times, high resolution photos, in-line commenting capabilities and higher quality videos.

The increased consumption of news on social also points to a larger trend of blurred lines between media outlets and brands. Brands understand the powerful nature of delivering a great content experience on social media sites to ultimately extend the reach and pass along effect it can drive.

Image via Shutterstock

Tags: facebook instant articles, facebook marketing, social marketing, social media trends, Wayin

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How Facebook"s Instant Articles may impact social