If you are quite the storyteller, Facebook will soon be offering its publishers the chance to publish stories direct for mobile consumption with a WordPress plugin. The company has been working with a small number of WordPress users to beta test the plugin. The plugin will offer a bunch of interactive tools to customize stories.
The idea here is to help publishers create instant articles, and to do that Facebook has partnered with Automattic – the creator of WordPress, to test and develop this new plugin. We all first heard of this move in February, when Facebook made the announcement. The plugin will be first available to all publishers on April 12. So, if you are a publisher, you can create faster loading, interactive articles for social media consumption.
According to zdnet.com:
“The WordPress plugin alleviates much of the skills gap while also helping to make the Instant Articles format more ubiquitous.” Facebook’s engineering partner – Chris Ackerman also said in a blog post, “The plugin is open source, and we encourage the community to participate in its development to help publishers of all types take full advantage of the fast, native experience of Instant Articles.”
Facebook has been trying to push forth and advertise instant articles as a way to bring formatted content into News Feeds directly from publishers. For publishers however, this move has been riddled with controversies. For instance, how does Facebook propose to share ad revenue with these publishers?
Facebook has however said that publishers have two options to generate ad revenue. One option is to sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, and the other option would be to use Facebook’s Audience Network for monetization. In its bid to further help publishers, Facebook has said that publishers can track article data and traffic using web analytics tools such as comScore.
So, as a user or even as a publisher, how do you think this move will affect you? How do you like the idea of finding stories to read right in your News Feed?
