Instant Articles is designed to give a faster and interactive experience for reading articles in Facebook’s News Feed, according to a news release from the company.
“Instant Articles”, according to Facebook will reduce the amount of time it takes news articles to load on its platform. Bar ‘Instant Articles’, news stories and publishers content takes an average of eight seconds to load, which is “by far the slowest single content type on Facebook”
This new feature means that users don’t have to click onto an organization’s site to see their stories. Instead, they will be able to see stories within Facebook, with publishers making money from them either by selling ads in the pieces or participating in Facebook’s own ad programme.
“Fundamentally, this is a tool that enables publishers to provide a better experience for their readers on Facebook,” said Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. “Instant Articles lets them deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models.”
Instant Articles is starting off on Facebook for iPhone. It will initially feature stories from The New York Times, the BBC, National Geographic, NBC, Buzzfeed and other publishers. It’s unclear whether new sources will be able to join.
Facebook recently launched an augmented traffic control tool (ATC) for developers to boost accessibility via sluggish networks and another program to reduce the internet penetration barriers in developing nations via internet.org.
