Sources: Facebook offering 100% of revenue to publishers for hosted media if they sell ads, 70% if Facebook sells ads
Facebook Offers to Let Publishers Keep Revenue From Certain Ads — Publishers currently post links to content but mobile device speed frustrating users
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's pitch addresses the friction named in its own description: publishers post links, but slow mobile loads frustrate readers before they reach the story. Hosting articles natively fixes the load time — the open question is who keeps the money. The reported terms are unusually generous up front: 100% of ad revenue if publishers sell their own ads against the hosted pages, 70% if Facebook's sales team does.
Re/code's follow-up a week later judged the Instant Articles terms a good deal "at least for now" — the qualifier that matters, because Facebook has since tightened the economics: December policy changes let more ads run per article while steering campaigns toward Facebook-only inventory [[a:837515]], and by 2017 the company was paying guaranteed monthly sums for committed video output [[a:918338]] and testing a mid-roll format at a 55% split, matching YouTube [[a:915611]].
First-order effects
- Publishers signing on get instant-loading hosted articles but accept a two-tier split in which Facebook takes 30% whenever its own sales force fills the ad slot — ceding both the reader relationship and part of the margin on their own content.
Second-order effects
- Rival distribution platforms face pressure to match the 100% self-sold term to keep publishers posting links instead of full articles, and advertisers gain two competing sales channels — publisher-direct and Facebook-sold — for the same hosted page.
Third-order effects
- The trajectory from 100/70 toward YouTube-style 55% splits suggests platform take rates ratchet upward once publishers' infrastructure and audiences sit inside the feed — making revenue-share terms, not traffic, the durable battleground between publishers and distribution platforms.
The trend: News distribution is consolidating into platform-hosted formats whose revenue splits start generous and tighten as publishers become dependent on the platform's audience and ad stack.