Content is king, but will FB be king-maker?

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to tweet about it, did it really fall? This inversion of a classic philosophical question is often brought up when one looks to describe our social media saturated world. And yet one of its more subtle undertones addresses the speed at which we have come to use our social media services, as is evident from the interchangeable use of tweeting and seeing.

The relationship between software and speed is a bond that is deeply ingrained. One of the goals of the modern software programmer is frugality: every extra line and character of code, after all, places an unnecessary demand on the computer processor. The more a set of code can be pruned to its essence, the more efficiently and faster programs could run, thus creating an optimized system.

The demand for greater speed in terms of user experience, amongst other things, was one of the driving factors behind the rise of native mobile applications over web browsers. Two recent developments indicate that the Web, as accessed through a mobile browser, is no longer suitable for even text, let alone applications or a satisfactory user experience in the current generation.

The first is the launch of Facebook’s Instant Articles: the accompanying press release points out that news “stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook” and that with Instant Articles, the “reading experience [is] as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.”

With Instant Articles, Facebook has essentially managed to reduce the loading time of a news article to .8 seconds. Why is this relevant? One possible answer is located within the nature of the mobile browsing experience: browsing the Web on a smartphone is a process that doesn’t allow for multi-tasking.

If a user clicks on a news link from a third-party destination such as Facebook or Google, they play a game of Russian roulette as they go to either a news website with a better-than-average loading and browsing experience (The Verge or New York Times), a website that is slow and user-unfriendly (Bloomberg, for example) or a destination whose user experience is atrocious and crippled by pop-up advertisements (Forbes, amongst others). Once they land on a less-than-optimal website, it is difficult to go back or to exit and in the process, precious time is lost. The solution to this is Instant Articles, a product that allows users to read news articles quickly without leaving Facebook.

The smartphone user’s obsession with speed plays out to the extent that even a perceived faster perfomance, as in the early days of Instagram, can result in greater user engagement metrics. This ties neatly into a second recent development: Google’s rumoured decision to launch a ‘Buy button’ next to its paid search results. Interestingly enough, Google’s Buy button and Facebook’s Instant Articles stem from the same problem. If a user clicks on an online retailer webpage through Google on a mobile phone, and it is of questionable quality, it reflects poorly on Google’s user experience and depresses click-throughs. By setting up a Buy button, and controlling the online shopping experience, Google solves the problem of speed and user experience in addition to gaining greater user engagement and access to valuable credit card information. In both situations, the technology companies control the core product, and continuously improve on speed and user experience, while serving as a prime mobile browsing destination. And this is perhaps the most important take-away of today’s mobile Web development: browsers simply no longer cut it, not at least for the type of speed and user experience we now demand. The success of Instant Articles and the Buy button will signal a dire future for content creators and companies that rely on a Web presence to survive (such as online retailers). While theoretically each media company could produce a state-of-the-art smartphone application—which they are currently trying to do— users will not download and use an infinite amount of content apps; keeping track of all of them would be an impossible task and result in a poor-quality user experience.

In addition to this, content companies and online retailers will also struggle to compete with Facebook and Google’s speed-focused technical solutions. As tech writer Om Malik puts it, “If you need Facebook to solve the page load problem, then as a media entity you need to be Darwin-ed”. Or in other words, they deserve to die an early death.

If Instant Articles is a success, it will create a division on the Web between ‘Destinations’, or websites such as Facebook and Google, which come with blazing speed and a high-quality user experience, and ‘Peripheries’ such as content companies which have no choice but to cede control over their user experience to Facebook and Google. If the peripheries are to survive, not only do they have to adapt to a new online business model in addition to worrying about their content, they also need to concentrate on the reality of today’s mobile Web; an entity that values speed and network performance above all else.

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