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A comment on Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles. Parent comment

Re:Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles by niftich on Sunday April 16, 2017 @04:55PM (#14127455)
Of course these firms are struggling -- (did I word this confusingly?) The point is, it's a market that never took off, and Facebook could change that very quickly, due to their sheer scale, their market penetration, their homescreen presence on millions of devices, and the value of the audience they already command.

They don't even need it to be a significant amount of their income. But they could show that some people are in fact willing to pay, which may be enough to entice big publishers to supply content to Facebook again, closing the loop on the original idea of "outsourcing [news] distribution".

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Re:Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles by coldtea on Sunday April 16, 2017 @05:43PM (#14127698)
>the point is, it's a market that never took off, and Facebook could change that very quickly, due to their sheer scale

But maybe, I say, it never took off for a reason? Some things are just not what people want.

(Though of course all the content providers crave them like crazy)

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Re:Big publishers are fleeing from Facebook's Instant Articles by ethbro on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:48AM (#14138747)
I think niftich's reasoning was chicken and egg.

No one (practically speaking) accepts micropayments because there's no unified system with good UX, and no one can build a unified system with a good UX because no one is accepting micropayments. Facebook could change all that in the same way that MS can push a feature to Windows and instantly make a new market. Barrier to entry looks different when you're a de facto monopoly.

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