Say you are a content publisher and you want the articles you push out to be available to a lot of readers. What do you do then? Do you go for Apple News? Or Google AMP? Or Facebook’s Instant Articles? Facebook is now providing publishers with something that will help them bridge this gap.
The social networking platform is introducing support for AMP as well as Apple News as part of the Instant Articles software development kit. So basically, the new updated SDK will come with an extension that will allow publishers to push out content in all three formats all at once. Facebook will also offer publishers methods using which, they would be able to apply custom templates to AMP as well as Apple News.
This part is particularly interesting, since you will be able to edit the look of your articles in Apple News And Google AMP. So basically, you will be able to design an article and then, publish it everywhere. You can try it out right now, by going through an extension to the Facebook Instant Articles SDK, which is on Github.
Apparently, Facebook decided to go with this approach after discussions that stemmed from tis Journalism project. While that particular project was geared upon inproving Facebook’s relations with major media publishers, many media publishers have been pulling up stakes and leaving Instant Articles due to the company’s lack of monetization option, and the way it shares revenue with them.
Meanwhile, Facebook is now hoping that is will be able to lure publishers back to its platform by offering them the ability to publish to multiple formats through a central location. It could work, but the company will have to do better than that if it wants news and other content creators to resort to its platform. After all, they are giving up quite a lot of control over how the content is presented and monetized so it is only fair that they expect some returns.
