Facebook’s proprietary solution quick loading content, Instant Articles, will be made available to everyone as of April 12th. Publishers of any size, anywhere in the world, will be able to post content to Facebook using the Instant Articles platform.
Previously, the platform was only available to a small test group of a few hundred publishers. The goal was always for it to be available to everyone, Facebook says, and come April 12th at the F8 conference it will be ready for a full roll out,
Similar to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Facebook’s Instant Articles aim to solve the problem of slow-loading content on mobile devices. Web articles take an average of 8 seconds to load on Facebook’s app, which is the slowest of any single content type. Instant Articles is said to be able to load articles up to 10 times faster than standard mobile web articles.
Publishers have full control over how the content is displayed in an Instant Article, including ad placements, and will have access to page analytics data. In fact, publishers can even sell their own ads direct to advertisers for placement in Instant Articles and use their own tracking platforms, such as Google Analytics.
Publishers will keep 100% of the revenue made from ads not sold through Facebook. Alternatively, there is always the option to monetize content through the Facebook Audience Network.
Facebook claims it will be easy for publishers to adapt to publishing via Instant Articles because it is built using the same publishing tools already in use on the social network. According to its own documentation, the easiest way to publish Instant Articles is to create a unique RSS feed that gets fed.
Instant Articles can also be created manually on Facebook itself. Once made available to everyone, you’ll be able to click Publishing Tools at the top of your page and select Instant Articles from the menu on the left of the screen.
Expect more details after the official worldwide release on April 12th.
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