Facebook's evolving relationship with publishers

Stand-alone reader app Paper is the latest of Facebook's stand-alone apps to shut down

Facebook is becoming an increasingly important distribution channel for publishers, but the road to becoming the next mega network is dotted with some trial and error.

Facebook's news reader app - Paper - was removed from the app store on Thursday.  

"In 2014 we launched Paper, a standalone app designed to give people a new way to explore and share stories from friends and the sources they care about," the company wrote in a goodbye message, posted on Paper.

"Our goal with Paper was to explore new immersive, interactive design elements for reading and interacting with content on Facebook, and we learned how important these elements are in giving people an engaging experience."

Paper launched in January 2014. It displayed stories based on themes, which allowed the user to follow their specific interests. Its first section was the user's News Feed, which featured not only stories, but also photos, videos and longer written posts. 

Users had the ability to customize the app, with over a dozen sections, including photography, sports, food, science and design, to curate news from.

A blow to publishers?

The closing of Paper can be looked as an indication of Facebook's evolving relationship with publishers, one that the company has already started to test. 

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it would be pushing more content from friends and family on the News Feed, meaning that articles posted by pages, and publishers, would not be as prominently displayed as they had been before. 

Publishers are not going to abandon Facebook over this though, which indicates one very important thing: they need Facebook more than Facebook needs them. The company is the top source of referral traffic to digital publishers, beating Google, 39 percent to 34 percent.

The company has completely disrupted the digital publishing industry, and content creators simply can't afford to not be on the platform, even if their content will be pushed down a bit. 

Even with that advantage, Facebook is by no means ending its relationship with publishers. Rather, it means that those posting articles will have to do a little more work to get them seen, now that there's no app specifically dedicated to those article, and the publishers will have a tougher fight to get noticed on the News Feed. 

It's not only publishing that Facebook has been disrupting, but video as well. 

Starting early last year, Facebook began to challenge YouTube as a video creation hub. It even launched a dedicated feed late last year, where users can exclusively watch video. And it saw its video views climb to four billion every single day by last summer, which then doubled to eight billion by the Fall.

Facebook's reign as the king of video on social media was short lived, though, as it now has to worry about a new up and comer in Snapchat, which has already surpassed Facebook in daily video views. 

Facebook's mobile strategy

The closing of Paper is also an indication that perhaps Facebook's mobile strategy isn't working, as it has been forced to close a number of its stand-alone apps. 

While initially popular, debuting as the number 2 app on the App Store in the U.S., Paper fell quickly; only a month after its debut it had hit number 357. By the end of March, it would no longer even be in the top 1,000 apps. 

While it failed to catch on broadly, it should be noted that Paper did retain a fairly high ranking among news apps in the U.S., rarely falling out of the top 100. Maybe that says a lot about the overall popularity of news apps. 

Paper has the distinction of being the first  product from Facebook Creative Labs, the company's initiative dedicated toward making stand-alone apps.

Creative Labs was shut down last year, along with three other apps it had developed: Snapchat competitor Slingshot; anonymity app Rooms; and Riff, a tool for friends to share idea and collaborate on video.

The company also previously shut down Poke, which was it's first attempt to copy Snapchat, and Camera, which was doomed as soon it bought Instagram. 

So Paper is far from alone as a Facebook app that failed to become the next Messenger, but it also wasn't a total bust, as it led to Instant Articles. That's a feature that allows articles to load inside of Facebook, meaning they load faster, while also increasing the time spent inside the Facebook app by giving people less incentive to leave. It also makes it easier for publishers to share content.

"We know that Paper really resonated with you--the people who used it--so we've tried to take the best aspects of it and incorporate them into the main Facebook app," Facebook wrote.

"For example, the same team that built Paper also built Instant Articles—a fast and interactive experience for reading articles in News Feed—using many of the same tools, design elements, and fundamental ideas as Paper."

(Image source: snapguide.com)