Platforms like Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP are making it harder, not easier, to publish to the web
Platforms like Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP
are making it harder, not easier, to publish to the web
Creating content for these formats reintroduces a coding
requirement, and online code is vastly more complicated today than it was in
the mid-1990s.
BY JAN DAWSON OCT 20, 2016, 2:46P
One of the wonderful things about the rise of the web,
twentysomething years ago, was the way in which it democratized publishing —
suddenly, anyone with an idea could set up a website and make it available to
anyone. Early on, publishing online required at least a rudimentary
understanding of code. To be an online writer meant you also had to be a coder.
But, services quickly emerged that created WYSIWYG editors for online
publications, so literally anyone who had used a word processor could create
online content.
Recently, however, we’ve seen the rise of proprietary
formats like Google’s AMP, Facebook’s Instant Articles and the Apple News
Format, which threaten to de-democratize publishing on the web. To be clear,
I’m not making a philosophical argument about the closed nature of these
platforms but something much more practical: Creating content for these formats
reintroduces a coding requirement, and online code is vastly more complicated
today than it was in the mid-1990s.
A personal history
I first encountered the web when I entered university in
1994. It was a pretty primitive thing back then, with very limited ways to
access it, and it was almost entirely text-based. But over the next four years,
things moved forward rapidly, with additional web browsers improving the
process of browsing the web ,and hosting and other online services making it
easier for ordinary people like me to set up an online presence. By the time I
graduated in 1997, not only was browsing the web a big part of my life but I had
a website of my own. In order to build that website, I had to learn HTML,
which, at the time, was a very simple thing to grasp, at least at a basic
level. But that coding requirement still prevented many people from creating an
online presence.
Interestingly, I basically took a two-year break from the
web between early 1998 and early 2000 while I was serving as a missionary in
Asia. When I returned, the web had again moved on significantly. Blogger had
launched in 1999 and was one of the first sites that enabled people to create
their own websites without knowing anything about coding, web hosting or any of
the other more technical aspects that had previously characterized online
publishing. Almost all of my online publishing since has been based on various
blogging platforms and, for the last 10 years, almost exclusively on
self-hosted WordPress sites.
Along the way, because I’ve always had something of an
interest in coding, I’ve beefed up my understanding of HTML, grappled with CSS
style sheets, and even done some messing around with PHP. But I’m always
enormously grateful I don’t have to try to build sites that would perform well
from the ground up — I’ve long since given up on that idea.
Enter AMP, Instant Articles and Apple News
So much for my personal history. Since last summer, we’ve
seen what I’d argue is the latest phase in this online publishing evolution. It
involves the creation of a variety of proprietary formats for online
publishing. Google has been spearheading the Accelerated Mobile Pages project
(AMP), which launched officially almost a year ago. Facebook introduced its Instant
Articles format last summer, with a similar objective of accelerating the
delivery of articles on mobile devices. And Apple introduced News as part of
iOS 9, opening it up to publishers over the summer and to most users in the
Fall, albeit with different intentions.
Here’s what’s these platforms have in common, however:
Each uses proprietary formats to deliver articles to readers. Technically,
these formats use standards-based elements — for example, AMP is a combination
of custom HTML, custom JavaScript and caching. But the point here is the
outputs from traditional online publishing platforms aren’t compatible with any
of these three formats. And in order to publish to these formats directly, you
need to know a lot more code than I ever did back in the mid-1990s before the
first round of WYSIWYG tools for the web emerged.
We’re effectively turning back the clock to a pre-web
world in which the only publishers that mattered were large publishers, and it
was all but impossible to be read if you didn’t work for one of them.
As a solution, each of these platforms has provided tools
intended to bridge the gap — all three, for example, have WordPress plugins to
convert content to the appropriate formats. But a quick read of the reviews for
the Facebook and AMP plugins tells you they don’t seem to be doing the job for
many users. The Apple News plugin has a higher rating, but I know from my own
experience that it’s problematic. Both Facebook and Apple also offer RSS tools
to import existing content, but there are limitations around both (Apple News
doesn’t allow advertising in RSS-driven publications, while Facebook IA
requires a custom RSS feed with IA-specific markup, which is again going to be
beyond the ken of most non-coding publishers). Apple news offers a WYSIWYG
tool, but it’s extremely basic (it doesn’t support embeds, block quotes, or
even bullet points).
Why does all this matter? After all, no one is forcing
anyone to use any of these formats — publishing to the open web is still
possible. While that’s technically true, at least two of these formats — AMP
and Instant Articles — are being favored by the two largest gatekeepers to
online content: Google and Facebook. Google now favors AMP results in search,
while Facebook does the same within its News Feed, though less explicitly (by
favoring faster-loading pages, it gives IA content a leg up). Apple News is
different — it’s a self-contained app, and it’s basically irrelevant to you as
a publisher unless your readers are using it. But if you do decide to use it,
unless you publish in Apple News Format, you can’t monetize your content there,
and Apple is pushing the News app heavily to its users.
Turning back the clock
The upshot of all of this is, unless you’ve comfortable
with fairly advanced web coding, or can pay someone who is, your online
publication is likely to become a second-class citizen on each of these new
platforms, if it has a presence there at all. And, as these platforms —
especially AMP and Instant Articles — suck up an ever greater proportion of
online content, that’s going to leave smaller publishers out in the cold.
That in turn means we’re effectively turning back the
clock to a pre-web world in which the only publishers that mattered were large
publishers, and it was all but impossible to be read if you didn’t work for one
of them. That seems like an enormous shame, and from a practical standpoint,
matters a lot more to me as an online writer than more philosophical debates
about open versus closed platforms.
A version of this essay was originally published at
Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective
on the tech industry.
Jan Dawson is founder and chief analyst at Jackdaw, a
technology research and consulting firm focused on the confluence of consumer
devices, software, services and connectivity. During his 13 years as a
technology analyst, Dawson has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from
policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. Prior to founding Jackdaw,
Dawson worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as chief telecoms
analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally. Reach him
@jandawson.
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