Facebook Launches ‘Instant Articles’; New Monetization Opportunity For Publishers

On May 12, Facebook announced the launch of ‘Instant Articles’ that will help publishers to create fast and interactive articles on the social network. Instant articles make the reading experience about ten times faster than the standard mobile web articles, according to reports.

In a blog post on Facebook’s media section, the company says, Instant Articles has been designed to give publishers control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities. Publishers can sell advertisements in their articles and keep the revenue or they can opt to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold stock. Apart from that, publishers can also track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools, as per the blog post.

“Instant Articles lets them (publishers) deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models,” says Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, in the blog.

The social networking giant is working with 9 launch partners for Instant Articles. The 9 launch partners include The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, The Atlantic, BBC News, NBC, The Guardian, Bild and Spiegel, as mentioned by Facebook on its blog. Currently, users will be able to see them on the iOS version of Facebook’s app while the Android version is yet to come, reports The Verge.

According to the report on The Verge, articles that are hosted on Facebook’s servers bring in a genuinely better experience than those stories that took 8 seconds to load on the mobile web.

Will Instant Articles bring in a new trend to the Media Business?

As a news distributor Facebook is creating new opportunities for the publishers, who can now let the social networking company sell advertisements on their Instant Articles by splitting revenue with Facebook or they can opt for selling ads themselves and keep all the revenue for now, reports The Verge.

The report on The Verge points out "the arrival of instant articles marks a turning point in the evolution of the news." If the concept works out well and Facebook gains dominance in news distribution, publishers could get more dependent on the platform they can’t control. Even then, top publishers have signed up with Facebook to push this initiative forward and very soon many publishers will have to join the league, reports The Verge.

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