Have you come across Artifact yet? Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom are launching a new app. According to Casey Newton, the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and Artificial Intelligence. It is still in beta but is opening up. I got access so wanted to take you through the first look. 

First, let’s look at the onboarding. 

At first glance, this takes a lot from the best active personalisation practices we have seen elsewhere, such as Medium and Substack (more here). After choosing topics, you can “add paid subscriptions.” The choice of wording here is interesting because I wasn’t asked for login details to titles I subscribe to. It purely prioritises the brand. My guess here is that “paid” is the closest proxy to what you actually like, not what you say you like. This differentiation may go some way towards their AI filtering stories. 

The last part of the onboarding asks you to turn on alerts, now an essential element to get attention on a smartphone full of apps.

I’ve seen it called the TikTok for news, focusing on personalisation. Let’s look at how they handle that in the app.

Once you finish onboarding, Artifact gives a clear explanation that it needs you to read 25 articles to start personalising your feed. You land on the “For you” page and from then on, you see the circle in the bottom showing how close you are to that magic 25.

On the top navigation are the topics you choose on the first screen during the onboarding. At the top of the page, “Headlines” is a sideways scroll of the major topics, where there are 20 different articles that have been read by 131 people. If you click through the headline, you see different headlines from publications on this singular subject. I assume over time the ranking of the publications shown will be algorithmically driven with a mixture of personal preference and popularity.

The bottom navigation changes slightly once you are some way towards your 25 articles needed for the algorithm to work properly. The center button stays the same and takes you to a scroll of Headlines. And the right button takes you to your personal settings (where I was able to sneakily change my publisher subscriptions to reflect those I want to see, not just those I currently pay for).

So far I have been hugely impressed with the appearance, ease of use, and relevance. But what about the article page? 

It seems that at the moment they are simply scraping articles from the Web. This is understandable as it’s nigh on impossible to strike deals with all the publishers this early. However the reading experience on Artifact is at the mercy of that publisher’s Web experience. See examples below. The New York Times is easy to read; it’s clean. Wired threw a subscription pop-up at me as soon as I got onto the page, and UPROXX has ad over ad, presumably display and in stream.

Anything else you should know? Why yes, I am pleased you asked. I focused on the product itself, but let’s take a minute to talk strategy. 

There are a vast number of aggregators out there, so what does this one offer that is so different? Some people say that it is trying to “rival Twitter.” Right now, it’s third-party news content only, but it could expand to commenting, to follow people, to individuals. We don’t yet know. Apparently they are optimising for time spent, not by clicks. 

Let’s not forget there was an excellent algorithmically driven news app called Toutiao. Engagement was off the charts. Do you know which company launched that? ByteDance. You know what else they later launched? TikTok.

If this is simply the first look, I am impressed and am looking forward to seeing what else they do by way of personalised news. 

If you want to read more on this, I highly recommend Casey Newton’s article here.

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

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