As of April 12th Facebook’s Instant Articles program will be opened up to all publishers “of any size, anywhere in the world”, announced Facebook product manager Josh Roberts in a blog post.
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The expansion of Instant Articles will coincide with Facebook’s F8 developer conference, which is taking place on April 12-13 this year.
Facebook Instant Articles launched last May and the pool of publishers showcasing content was very limited. In its announcement, Facebook acknowledges the rationale behind the roll out: “Slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones”.
More Instant Articles means a better News Feed, and the ad business Facebook built inside the News Feed is hugely lucrative. The revenue, then, comes from ads hawked within the stories, of which Facebook will handle the matter – for a fee – or let the publishers deal with it themselves.
Facebook’s Instant Articles platform, which speeds up the loading of news articles by hosting them on Facebook’s servers, has been widely available to users of the company’s iOS and Android app since May. “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”.
For them, it means easier access to more news sources, and faster load times for everything from text to video.
According to Facebook, they have streamlined the process for publishers to make it easy for them to hop on the bandwagon.
The Instant Articles format is now being used by “a few hundred” publishers worldwide. Additionally, publishers can use their existing web-based analytics systems to track article traffic or use third-party providers. The Wall Street Journal reports some publishers are now earning as much per click to an Instant Article as to a traditional page.
These publishers are able to make money from this format by hosting their own ads, or letting Facebook do it and simply splitting revenues.
The service has proven appealing to many publishers that have struggled to bring in advertising revenue as their audiences increasingly shifted to mobile, an area in which Facebook holds a strong position. After all, as The Verge points out, creating Instant Article feeds does require a certain amount of technical know-how that smaller, independent blogs and even newspapers may not have.
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The 350 word/15% rule applies to these “house ads” that promote a publisher’s own content or monetization.
