In May of last year, Facebook launched their Instant Articles feature bringing 9 publishers on board, they expanded their base to over 350 publishers in December of 2015, which included 25 Indian publishers. Now, Facebook has opened Instant Articles to all publishers worldwide, big or small.
In an official announcement made today, Josh Roberts, Product Manager at Facebook said, “On April 12th at Facebook’s F8 conference, we will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world. To date, we’ve been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. While we were getting feedback and making improvements to Instant Articles, in parallel we’ve been building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly.”
What is Facebook Instant Articles?
Facebook built instant articles with a aim to offer Facebook users a fast, easy and streamlined experience to consume news and information on their timeline. Instant Articles speeds up loading of articles on user’s mobile devices. It offered publishers a new way to distribute their articles and stories on Facebook.
Facebook claims that Instant Articles displays stories as much as ten times faster than conventional mobile browsers, while also providing the kind of fluid, high-quality experience and interactivity people expect.
In technical terms, it is a HTML5 document optimized for fast mobile performance, rich storytelling capabilities, branded design and customized visual display.
Benefits to Publishers
One of the questions that most publishers had with Instant articles when it launched initially was – Whether, they would be able to show advertisements on Instant articles or not. As most of the publishers depend on Advertisement as their income source, unable to display ads would have been a show-stopper.
However, Facebook has clarified that with Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can even choose to monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network. Additionally, publishers can use their existing web-based analytics systems to track article traffic or use third-party providers.
This becomes a win-win for publishers as the content they publish can be distributed through Facebook and they can keep all the advertisement revenue as well!
You can find more details on Facebook Instant articles here.
