Facebook’s instant articles provide a pretty cool way for advertisers to quickly reach out to their audience on the social networking platform. However, it did not come without its share of issues. For instance, instant articles had a design all their own and all the careful plotting and scheming on the publishers part — which usually had the aim of getting more advertisements on the page — was usually in vain.
However, that is changing now courtesy a brand new update from Facebook. The social networking platform is now allowing publishers to squeeze in a few more advertisements inside each of their articles. Under the new scheme of things, ads can appear along every 250 words, instead of every 350, as previously stipulated by Facebook.
Interestingly, this change is thanks in no small part to Facebook’s new Journalism Project, which saw the company commit to building better ties with the media industry and work to achieve mutually acceptable goals. Apparently, one of the first and most hotly requested publisher demand had to do with more advertisement dollars and Facebook decided to oblige them.
Of course, Facebook doesn’t want to unnecessarily aggravate news publishers. The social media platform generates the bulk of its revenue through advertisements — and a large part of people visiting the social networking platform come there because of the content. And guess where does the content come from? Of course, not all of the content comes from instant articles. However, many, many media publications use the service and together generate quite a lot of content.
And more quality content equates to greater user engagement, which is exactly what Facebook wants. However, it has had to lock horns with media publications in the past due to the way it runs things. The company has started relenting of late though. Today’s announcement for instance, comes after the organization first announced that publishers would be able to extend their directly sold ad campaigns to Instant Articles and keep all the revenue instead of sharing it with Facebook.
That said though, Facebook still has a lot of control over how content is presented on its platforms, how many ads it shows and so on and so forth.
While many have criticized it as a dictatorial policy and asked Facebook to allow publishers to show howsoever many advertisements they want, Facebook is at its essence a social networking platform. I am sure it wouldn’t like to ruin the uniformity of a feature as important as Instant articles by allowing publishers to stuff their articles silly with advertisements.
