The New York Times and The Guardian Sign On for Google and Twitter's Instant Article Push
Peter Kafka / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's Instant Articles offer of full ad revenue and analytics data set the template this spring, and Google and Twitter responded within days by announcing an open-source mobile publishing product aimed at launch this fall.
Signing The New York Times and The Guardian gives that challenger its first marquee publishers — and it lands just before Google's New York event, where the project is expected to be unveiled.
First-order effects
- The Times and The Guardian gain fast-loading mobile distribution outside Facebook's walled garden, while Google's project moves from announcement to having named launch partners.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces a credible open-source rival at exactly the moment it is scaling up — days later it added over a dozen new publishers, with the Washington Post committing to publish all of its articles there.
Third-order effects
- If both formats keep signing major papers, news distribution splits into competing hosted-article ecosystems, with publishers negotiating ad revenue and data terms against two platform standards instead of one.
The trend: Mobile news hosting is consolidating into a platform race between Facebook's proprietary Instant Articles and an open-source Google-Twitter counterweight, with big publishers as the contested prize.