With more viewers on the web, brands and companies are competing with each other to get potential customers. But with more viewers, there are more devices and also multiple competing format to use for this purpose.
Facebook has Instant Articles. Since the company introduced the feature, brands and publishers that are active on the social media, are converting their web pages to meet Facebook's proprietary format. Google also has a similar approach using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Apple with News Format that optimizes content to its iOS devices.
For brands and businesses, there are many to choose from. But since Facebook, Google and Apple are having their own audience, using their respective proprietary format together can be difficult.
In 25 May 2017, Facebook introduces a solution for this by rolling out Instant Articles support for both AMP and Apple News. The tool is part of the company's open source Instant Articles software development kit.
Facebook updates the SDK to include an extension that allows brands and publishers to build a content that is publishable in all three formats. To do this, the SDK takes the needed markup to create Instant Articles, and then used them to create the code needed to build AMP pages and also Apple News.
Facebook said that it will offer ways for publishers to apply the custom styling templates for the competing services. So things like colors, font styling, captions and so forth, can be mirrored closely as possible in other formats.
The idea for this extension was from the Facebook Journalism Project, a program that aims to connect Facebook with media publishers. While the program aims to inform the social giant's roadmap for its upcoming news feature, many publishers have abandoned Facebook's format since it lacks monetization options.
Publishers weren't happy that Facebook is cutting down revenue sharing and preventing them from having a direct relationship by stripping down their pages to be mobile-optimized, Facebook's way. What this means for publishers, they can't serve the same advertisements as on the web, unable to encourage donations, push paid subscriptions, promote email newsletters or events, or others.
The update to Facebook's SDK that allows brands and publisher to design once and publish anywhere capability, comes just in time to solve this problem for both Facebook and publishers.
Previously, Facebook has also tweaked some of its rules on Instant Articles, like for example, allowing publishers to show more ads, among other things. But by tying up Instant Articles with AMP and Apple News, Facebook hopes that it can win back publishers' trust, without having to loosen many of its restrictions. And also, Facebook's format could also become more influential than its rivals'.