Facebook has begun directly implant news articles onto its site instead of making viewers click onto another page that leads to an article. There are two sides to this story — the publishing companies who view it as a bad thing, and the readers who view it as a good thing.
Obviously, readership is a huge indicator for how all major news corporations are doing. If readership is low, they’re most likely sinking in terms of profitability. Nowadays, news is digitized.
The bottom line is that the amount of clicks a site receives per day is imperative to its well-being. Nine top-gun news corporations made this deal with Facebook, including NBC News and the New York Times. The process for “instant articles” available on Facebook will be a gradual one, beginning with only a few articles per day. But soon, many more will be accessible.
Personally, I see this as a great idea for readers. It increases the likelihood that we will actually click on an article and fully read it. Although the time it takes an article to load is quite short, it feels like a lifetime in terms of how quickly we are able to manipulate the mechanisms on our phones.
For example, I had an interview a month or so ago and the woman asked me what I think they could improve on their site. I told her that the little slideshows with pictures and numbers waste time to load, and once people realize how long it takes they immediately exit out of the page.
It’s fact — we don’t like wasting time. We are a scrolling, zooming and fast-paced generation who uses phones to get information on the go.
This plan is great for readers like us, who don’t have time to click an article on our phones much less pick up an actual newspaper.
Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox ensured these news sites would be getting the same readership data that they would on their own sites. Also, media companies are allowed to use their own ads or have Facebook send a percentage of the profits from Facebook’s ads attached to articles.
Often times I’ll get asked: Where do you get your news? I’ll quickly respond, Facebook, BuzzFeed, Instagram, Reddit and on occasion the New York Times. It’s not that I’m not reading news on The Wall Street Journal or Forbes. I am being led to them through social media sites.
Facebook is unique in the respect that people can post news stories and comment on them. You are more likely to enjoy a news story than shared by a friend that a ?random article you might stumble upon. It’s intrinsically social, and media ?conglomerates have come to recognize this appeal.
The main fear of these news distributors is that they are going to lose grip of distribution powers. They will no longer be able to have a target audience on which to focus. Although this is a reasonable fear, there’s no stopping the audience that is going to read news that Facebook publicizes.
Facebook is the gatekeeper to news, and we no longer have to unlock the gate to read it. The gate is open, and its kingdom is ours for the reading.
jlkarl@indiana.edu
