Sadly, this looks like one more step in the walled garden web direction, somewhat like AOL sites back in the day. I am amazed publishers are apparently going along with this. They must be very desperate for views if they are willing to relinquish this much control.
I for one am hoping that this catches on, walled garden or not I'd rather spend my time reading content on an interface that I don't have to fight against (e.g. full screen overlay ads with a tiny x to close) and I trust facebook to build that better than anyone else.
I'm also surprised publishers are going along with it though, it seems a little ironic. The only reason this product is interesting is because so many mobile articles today have horrible UIs. Native views will probably be nicer anyway but publishers could mostly fix this right now if they were willing to give up my accidental ad clicks. But instead they need someone like facebook to save them from themselves in order to make their content consumable again.
I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. The rise of RSS in the mid 2000's gave way to all sorts of plugins to inject ads into your RSS feeds as a way to cope with the lost web traffic
AdBlockPlus / uBlock Origin user here - I haven't seen an overlay ad (or for that matter, a non-overlay ad) in years now.
And, no, I don't feel guilty - I might have felt guilty if I only paid for ads with my attention (I'm not sure though - I don't feel guilty ignoring the ads on a print newspaper). But allowing ads through means you give 20 or so organizations with questionable ethics complete info about your web use, including (but not limited) to when and what -- and those 20 organizations sell that info to the highest bidder. No, I don't feel guilty at all.
Overlays often have ask users to like some page on facebook, or to subscribe to some mailing list, it's not advertising. But you need to make a click to close it.
uBlock and AdBlockPlus make them go away, at least on website I frequent.
And facebook is one of those questionable ethics organizations I mentioned. The mere existence of a "Like" button (whether you click it or not) in 99.99% of the cases already gives facebook all the info about your surfing habits.
It's activated by clicking the icon or by using a keyboard shortcut (cmd+shit+x). So there is at least one single way to close any overlay on any website.
Also, I've seen a few things recently talking about how as it continues to get easier engineering-wise to build consumer sites/apps quickly and scale them to big audiences, design becomes an even more important differentiator. This facebook launch is an interesting counter example to that idea in that they'll own much of the design and UI.
"Design as differentiator" is the problem. There is an optimal way to design for readability, and all that "differentiation" usually does is making things worse and worse, because "we have to be different!".
Absolutely. I feel that news "content" is now all very clickbaity which is a huge turnoff. I've had to stop following a lot of trusted media because they're trending towards clickbait. Ever since the WaPo got bought by Bezos and pals a lot of their content has trended that way. It's sad but I guess I understand that that's what they need to do to survive.
How is this different than distribution of printed magazines, for example? Publishers produce their product and ship it to distribution centers. You can buy the magazines at the bus stop, or at the gas station, or even have it mailed to you.
You can find the article on facebook, or when you searched bing, or maybe even subscribe to their newsletter, get mobile notification from their mobile app on your phone.
And how is this publishers relinquishing their control? They will post on facebook no matter what. Integration with the platfrom gives them more data and another possible monetization stream with more perks on the way, I'm sure. What are they losing from this integration?
Imagine if they sent their articles to the supermarket and the supermarket decided how to lay it out and what ads to run. And perhaps also interspersed your articles with articles from other sources you did not vet ahead of time.
