

Facebook Instant Articles: A Slippery Slope - sinak
http://marketingland.com/facebook-instant-articles-slippery-slope-for-google-128596

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MichaelCrawford
FB's Instant Articles are very disturbing to me.

The reason is that it is of vital importance to any business that has a
website, to have live human visitors to their own website. Not so they can
click ads, but so that the visitors will provide organic links.

If the NYT publishes an article about Strawberry Jam on FB, and the WSJ
publishes an article about peanut butter on FB, I might link to a FB friend's
sandwich recipe. That will result in an incremental boost to FB's prosperity.

If instead the NYT publishes that article on its own website, I might link to
an article on the nytimes.com website. That will boost NYT's prosperity an
increment, but not Facebook's.

It is for this same reason that I will never publish a Mac OS X app on the App
Store. To self-publish an iOS App requires that the user jailbreak their
device. I see both sides of the argument but on the whole I am not inclined to
publish iOS Apps in the App Store either.

Consider that after many years of pressure, Apple is finally permitting the
developers to have analytics on their own apps.

What they are not permitting, is for developers to publish iOS apps on their
own websites. Just now it occurred to me, if Apple really has some good reason
to insist on controlling what apps may be installed on iDevices, why not just
supply a signature on the app installer - the .apk IIRC - then send the app
installer back to the developer?

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futuretext
Doesn't this sound like they're attempting to take traffic (and revenue) away
from other publishers? If you can read the articles on Facebook, why would you
want to go to a different website to read the same thing (obviously loyal
users won't leave)... Just seems like Facebook is trying to become a news
organization vs a social network.

