Facebook is launching its Instant Articles feature, which will be bringing full news articles from several publishers right on the News Feeds of users.
The articles, which will be loading on Facebook faster by 10 times, will be hosted on the servers of Facebook and will also feature a new look.
Despite concerns that Facebook could make publishers even more dependent on the social network to propagate their content, the program has not failed in attracting several big-name partners to sign up. The nine publishers that have signed up for the Instant Articles initiative are the New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographic, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC, NBC News, and Der Spiegel and Bild of Germany.
Instant articles will initially be available only on the iOS version of the social network's app, with the feature to be rolled out for the Android version soon. Most of these instant articles will look similar compared to the links that are already present in the News Feed, but with Facebook-created tools to allow the articles to stand out such as video-based covers that automatically play while the user is scrolling.
Casey Newton, writing for The Verge, said that instant articles that are tapped to load do so almost instantly in a demonstration of the feature at the headquarters of Facebook. This is because instant articles use the same technology that the social network uses to make pictures and videos load faster. The instant articles are already being pre-loaded as users approaches them on their News Feeds, with the speed of loading helped by the fact that modules that serve analytics and advertisements found on news articles on the Internet are not present in instant articles.
In turn, Facebook has added extra features to the instant articles, such as the logo of the publication at the top of the article along with a "follow" button so users can subscribe to the Facebook page of the publisher. Publishers can also choose to add pictures of authors and photographers to the articles, which users can click to subscribe to the public posts of the individuals.
In addition, pictures in instant articles can have audio captions and can be geo-tagged, and users can comment on the pictures to make them spread through the social network.
The point of all this is added exposure and revenue for publishers, according to Facebook.
"We designed Instant Articles to give publishers control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities," Facebook said in a press release announcing the launch of Instant Articles, adding that publishers can sell advertisements in the articles and they will be able to keep the revenue. Publishers can also utilize the Audience Network of Facebook to be able to monetize their unsold inventory. Lastly, publishers will also gain the ability to track the traffic and data of their articles through a variety of analytics tools that will be available to them.
