FB ‘Instant Article’ new threat to news industry

CAIRO – 21 July 2017: Facebook will be launching a subscription-based news service ‘Instant Article’ in October, despite American newspapers moving earlier for a law change to regulate the digital advertising market in order to stop digital giants such as Facebook and Google from taking over the news industry.

Immediately following the announcement, U.S. Huffington Post news website published an analysis to this new feature wondering if Facebook’s subscription-based news service is bad for the publishing industry.

Campbell Brown, the head of news partnerships at Facebook, said Thursday at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York plans for a new service of initiating a paywall that would cut off nonsubscribers after they had accessed 10 articles.

Facebook is apparently looking into adopting a metered pay wall model similar to that applied in the New York Times. The paper offers users access to up to 10 articles a month for free, after which they have to subscribe to read more.

Some American newspapers stated that the new paywall service could help news media companies and digital publishers bring in more revenue from placing their content on Facebook, although it was not yet clear how Facebook would split the revenue generated by a new paywall service with publishers.

Mark Zuckerberg seem to have a different agenda as despite it appears that this new feature is an attempt to tackle the fake news problem that many believe he unwittingly created and also bring more revenues to publishers and newspapers by publishing their articles and stories in ‘Instant Article.’

Huffington Post news stated that this new feature will feed personalized news stories from premium publishers based on a user’s preferences and interests and went to say that many people might find the notion of paying for news a rather outdated concept. Social media users might prefer live reporting from users on the ground on sites such as Twitter.

The biggest fear of this latest announcement is that publishers will depend more on Facebook to publish their stories and for revenue.

The news sites will be badly affected as according to Huffington Post, the lion share of traffic to most leading news sites or frankly most leading online publishers, originates from either Facebook or from Google. Essentially, tech giants have an alarming amount of control over the news industry.

Since November 2015, Egyptian online newspapers have voiced their fears over the future of the digital newspapers. Youm7 Editor-in-Chief Khaled Salah published on November 17, 2015 an article on the threats the Egyptian news industry could face as enormous amounts of revenue go to Facebook and Google.

“The online news industry in Egypt and the Arab world may face a major threat from some global social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, Google, etc., which dominate major fields of the advertising market worldwide,” Salah said.

Also on his Twitter account on June 30, 2016, Salah called on the Parliament to impose taxation on Facebook and Google ads.

A number of U.S. media giants formed a coalition under the title of ‘News Media Alliance,’ as the two companies dominate 70 percent of digital advertising industry.

Being reachable and accessible for millions of people worldwide, the two companies managed to pull a big share of the online ads without paying taxes.

The two companies, Facebook and Google, dominated 20 percent of the global advertising market in 2016, according to data and analysis agency Zenith in May 2017, without paying taxes on the online ads, which in return negatively affects the newspapers’ share of the ads revenues.

Now if you are used to getting the bulk of your news from Facebook, you have to think twice before reading any news story.