Google and Twitter gang-up on Facebook, Snapchat, and other companies with Instant Articles

Google and Twitter are working together to help publishers expand the horizon of their audience through the new initiative, named “Instant Articles.” A small team of publishers has been brought on-board for the project, which would be publishing articles for users, readable via smartphones. A number of other companies, including Facebook, Snapchat, and Apple have been using the service as of late, in a bid to help provide a platform to publishers to push their content through to readers via mobile phones.

Once the service is up and running, users would come across full articles on both websites, Twitter, and Google, on their handheld devices only, with the option readying them instantly. It is believed that the lag, which often causes annoyance among users, would be taken care of once the service gets rolled out. Hence, tapping on an article would bring it up instantly rather than users have to wait several seconds for it.

While most would expect the service to be rolled out in the same manner as it has been over the past few months by other companies, the case isn’t the same. Reports suggest that neither website, Google nor Twitter, would host the publisher’s article; users would be presented with a cached version of the page, while the article would be hosted on the publisher’s page only.

The project, as the word is, would be open source; hence, we could see a number of other tech firms join in on the act in the coming times. This could help Google, and Twitter crowd out the efforts being put in by other firms such as Facebook, or Snapchat.
The revenue generation and sharing still remains unclear as we await either company to lay light on the matter. Facebook’s Instant Articles gives away 100% of the revenue generated from the advertisement within the articles to the publishers, while notching up 30% of the revenue raised by the ads that the company sells against these articles.