Facebook Opens Up Instant Articles To Everyone

Facebook announced that on April 12, it will open Instant Articles to all publishers.

Facebook encourages publishers to prepare for the arrival of Instant Articles now by familiarising themselves with its technical requirements so that by April when the feature is launched, its all systems go. Late a year ago, Instant Articles supported about 1,000 articles a day, from National Geographic to Time to USA Today.

While Facebook didn’t give exact details on the amount of monies writers could expect from publishing and promoting via the “Instant Articles” platform, the Wall Street Journal reported the percentages in revenue-sharing that could be expected.

Google’s answer to Instant Articles – the open source AMP (which is being adopted by a variety of other organizations) – will get its real start for users this month when Google starts sending search traffic to the pages.

Readers: Have you experienced Instant Articles on Facebook yet?

When Instant Articles launched in May, the program was the subject of much concern among media types who were wary of giving social networks like Facebook too much power by using it as a means of distribution.

“To date, we have been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook”, Josh Roberts, product manager (Facebook) said in a statement.

Commenting on the impending global push of Instant Articles, Facebook said: “We will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers – of any size, anywhere in the world”. As The Verge points out, implementing it requires some web-coding prowess, and some publishers might prefer to use richer advertising methods not available to Instant Article posts.

According to Facebook, they have streamlined the process for publishers to make it easy for them to hop on the bandwagon. By offering Instant Articles to all publishers, it makes it easier for publishers to reach their audiences on Facebook.

The format loads articles inside the Facebook app more quickly than traditional links by stripping out most of the code and pre-fetching stories when you approach them in the News Feed.

It’s widely believed that Facebook will eventually take a revenue cut of all revenue generated through Instant Articles, similar to how Apple monetizes its Apple News platform.