Webmasters Earn Money Here!

Facebook ‘Instant Articles’ — Writers To Get Paid By Facebook About 70 Percent Of Ad Revenue

Facebook has announced that the company is opening up their “Instant Articles” program to more publishers than those listed on the Facebook page about “Instant Articles.” According to Facebook’s “Instant Articles” page, certain publications already provide instant articles as part of the program. Sites like the New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC News, the Atlantic, the Guardian, BBC News and others are already listed as part of the “Instant Articles” network.

“Thousands of Instant Articles are published on Facebook each day and are available to everyone who uses Facebook on iPhone and Android. Look for Instant Articles daily from these publishers and more.”

According to BuzzFeed, Facebook’s “Instant Articles” will open up to individual publishers as well as those larger and more established websites. However, even the smallest of publishers will need a website to link to upon creating their “Instant Articles,” because Facebook won’t allow the “Instant Articles” publisher to publish via Facebook only. However, it needn’t be a fancy website — it can simply be a website with articles that may get a boatload of views via the Facebook “Instant Articles” medium.

In the Facebook article titled “Opening Up Instant Articles to All Publishers,” published on February 17, and written by Josh Roberts, a Product Manager at Facebook, the explanation for creating “Instant Articles” is given in detail.

“We’re excited to announce that on April 12th at Facebook’s F8 conference, we will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world. To date, we’ve been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. While we were getting feedback and making improvements to Instant Articles, in parallel we’ve been building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly.”

While Facebook didn’t give exact details on the amount of money writers could expect from publishing and promoting via the “Instant Articles” platform, the Wall Street Journal reported the percentages in revenue-sharing that could be expected. The publishers who sell advertisements against pieces published to “Instant Articles” gain 100 percent of the money, whereas those publishers who posted to “Instant Articles” where Facebook sells the advertisement get to keep 70 percent of revenue.

Soon, Individuals Will Be Able To Publish Instant Articles (And Get Paid By … – BuzzFeed News: BuzzFeed News… https://t.co/udulXAhxMo

— adexchanges (@adexchanges) February 18, 2016

Facebook also explained that those who use “Instant Articles” will be able to use the “Facebook Audience Network” to make money off their content as well.

“With Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network.”

Facebook went on to explain that “Instant Articles” addressed the need to provide folks reading the news via their smartphones a fast way to process that news without slowly loading websites.

In the Facebook for Developers section, Facebook offers more detailed specifications for publishers on how to publish articles to the “Instant Articles” platform, and the type of languages that Facebook expects. With a quick-start guide, an explanation on creating articles, as well as a design guide, the process for creating articles for the “Instant Articles” platform has been spelled out in great detail by the social networking site.

Facebook opens up Instant Articles to all publishers https://t.co/nhfIWg3dD5

What Will Facebook Be Like When Instant Articles Are Available to Everyone? (Answer: Bad)

Good news for content creators: Facebook announced this week that it will soon roll out its Instant Articles platform to everyone.

Instant Articles, of course, are stories and articles and blog posts hosted on Facebook itself. Currently only available to a handful of institutional publishers — BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and the New York Times among them — Instant Articles theoretically improve a publication’s readership metrics simply by loading significantly faster. When a reader clicks through a link to an Instant Article on your Facebook feed — say, a Washington Post article — she’ll be taken to a minimally branded page that loads much more quickly than the article would on the Post’s own website. (For some perspective, 10 seconds qualifies as a long load time.) The Post keeps all revenue from advertising it sells itself on that article; extra inventory is sold on Facebook’s ad network at a 70/30 split between the Post and Facebook, respectively.

By opening up Instant Articles to everyone, Facebook is hoping to grow not only as a leading sourcing of web referral traffic, but as a first-party home to content itself. With Instant Articles, Facebook is offering publishers a 70 percent cut of ad revenue. And anyone can be a publisher. (New York's Science of Us blog is a participant, "potentially with more of our sites to come," I was informed.)

By offering some theoretical revenue to writers who might otherwise put their writing for free on another platform, Facebook hopes to attract more original content — and, BuzzFeed writes, undertake “an effort to bring more quality content to its platform, similar to the way YouTube’s revenue-share program is responsible for bringing talented creators to its site.”

This is an interesting comparison. Has YouTube’s revenue-share program really been responsible for bringing talented creators to its site? (Talented creators besides BuzzFeed’s enormous video operation, I mean.) There’s a very small class of extraordinarily successful vloggers, most of them appealing to a young audience. But there’s a larger middle class of vloggers and web series, whose struggles to break even, let alone profit, from their videos and series has been the subject of articles and profiles for years.

And there’s an enormous lumpen-proletariat class of mostly invisible channels made by people ripping clips from TV news, or uploading entire movies, or “freebooting” — stealing clips from Vine, YouTube, Instagram, or other channels and re-uploading them on their own channel.

Why wouldn’t Facebook’s Instant Articles end up the same way? Surely there is a handful of people with voices that will attract enough readers on Facebook to make a good living writing for it. And likely there will be a lot of writers who are currently posting for free to Twitter or Tumblr or Medium who might move to Facebook just to pick up the small amount of revenue it might provide them. And then there will be thousands of terrible pages simply copying and pasting news articles, listicles, humor pieces, and other highly shareable bits of fluff — run by the kind of people who recognize that for the amount of money you’re likely to make off of programmatic Facebook display ads, there’s little profit in writing original content.

In fact, we can get a kind of preview of the effect of open Instant Articles by looking at the way Facebook has tried to compete with YouTube — by providing better tools for hosting video on Facebook itself. (And by promoting Facebook-native videos more visibly.) It’s not pretty.

If we look at the current Facebook video economy as a precursor to Facebook’s text publishing economy, it’s easy to see it going not only off the rails but into the gutter. BuzzFeed (which is “all-in” on Instant Articles) lays out this scenario for freelancers (a.k.a. literally anyone):

Importantly, all Instant Articles need a web link as well, so someone participating couldn’t simply publish their work via Facebook only. They could, however, set up a simple website to stage the posts, and use Instant Articles as the primary distribution mechanism.

Tons of large new media operations produce cool and slick videos on Facebook, and the viewership numbers are skyrocketing! Also skyrocketing: Low-quality rips of poorly compressed videos originally upload to Instagram (themselves stolen from Vine). The freebooting world of Facebook  is largely untamed, and one might assume, decently profitable as well. It’s not hard to imagine the same going for Instant Articles as well.

For a small set of successful professionals, Instant Articles could become a full-time source of income (possibly, in the beginning, subsidized and encouraged to post on Facebook … by Facebook). For existing media organizations, it calms them as to anxieties regarding Facebook's industry-eating ambitions. And for everyone else, it offers yet another way to share other people’s work and reap the benefit.

Update: This post has been updated to reflect that at least one New York vertical is on Instant Articles.

CASHU moves its regulated business to Singapore CASHU, one of the leading players in the online payment industry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), has announced that it has successfully migrated its regulated business to Singapore and is now regulated under The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The move, which follows a recent management buyout and review of its financial operations, has been made in response to the changing due diligence requirements of CASHU customers, a global shift towards greater online payment regulation and user demand for a safer online e-commerce environment. The MAS regulatory framework also provides CASHU with the flexibility to work with local regulators across different territories. “With more than 70 percent of MENA’s population ‘unbanked’, prepaid services are vital for e-commerce and our ambition is to see the region’s prepaid business fully regulated which will increase the size of this market tremendously,” said CASHU CEO Thaer Suleiman. “Our move to put our central wallet under MAS significantly strengthens our compliance foundation, ideally positioning CASHU to respond to changes in regulations and global standards. We are currently working with several central banks in the MENA region towards more effective industry regulation.” CASHU has introduced a variety of operational improvements to its payment platform in accordance with MAS’s requirements for Stored Value Facility (SVF). These changes fall in line with global demands to enhance due diligence on wallet account holders and business partners to ensure compliance with new regulations and combat cybercrime. The KYC process, an abbreviation for ‘Know Your Customer’, is not new in the financial services industry, but the measures are not common place for e-payment platforms in MENA. “CASHU is the first, and most popular payment option for MENA users and the CASHU team is committed to preserve the platform’s convenience and ease-of-use,” Suleiman added. “Despite increased regulations and security measures, users will continue to experience a seamless and convenient payment process.” Established in 2002, CASHU was jointly acquired by the company’s senior management and Dubai-based investment firm Genero Capital LLC in December 2015.

Blogging platform Ghost shutting in UK and moving to Singapore SINGAPORE – Ghost, the online blogging platform, is coming to town. The UK non-profit organisation that runs the open source publishing platform will be shutting its UK operations and incorporating it in Singapore “in the next couple of months”. Founder of Ghost Foundation John O’Nolan made the announcement in a blog post yesterday (Feb 15), saying that the decision is “easily the biggest business change we’ve made to Ghost since it started, and will hopefully give us a much easier time trading internationally!”. “Singapore is a progressive country with a fast-growing startup scene, and is exceptionally in tune with the times,” he said. Mr O’Nolan revealed that the team had spent the last year looking for a country that met its list of requirements, which included having a “progressive government with sane accounting”. He added that “(Singapore) has all our needs covered” and also offered “a great many other benefits”, citing several global rankings that placed Singapore tops for ease of doing business, economic investment potential, best business environment, transparency of government policy making and public trust for politicians. He also noted that the Republic is ranked third in the world for its quality of education and for the least corrupt economy. Mr O’Nolan started Ghost in 2013 after a campaign on Kickstarter that raised about £196,000 (S$396,864) to get the project off the ground. Between 2012 and last year, Singapore moved up seven places to 10th in an international report which ranked start-up ecosystems. The report by Compass — an automated reporting and benchmarking software provider — was based on publicly available data. In another report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, technology start-ups alone are projected to contribute 2 per cent of the Singapore’s gross domestic product by 2035.