Dive Brief:

• At its F8 developer conference in April, Facebook will open Instant Articles to all publishers of any size around the world.
• The Instant Articles app was created to increase load times on the mobile web, and it also helped Facebook keep publishers’ content within its ecosystem.
• Instant Articles rolled out last May with an initial group of selected publisher partners including The Atlantic, BBC News, the New York Times and BuzzFeed.

Dive Insight:

"To date, we’ve been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. While we were getting feedback and making improvements to Instant Articles, in parallel we’ve been building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly," Facebook Product Manager Josh Roberts wrote in a blog post about the news.

Publishers have full control over their content, data and ads within Instant Articles, and keep 100% of direct-sold ad revenue. Publishers can also use existing web-based analytics systems or third-party tools to track article traffic.

In December, after publisher complaints that Instant Articles advertising policies were limiting revenue, Facebook expanded the number and type of ads publishers can run on the app.

Roberts also wrote, "We’ve made it easy for publishers to join by building a system based on the tools they already use. Instant Articles uses the languages of the web and works with publishers’ content management systems, and we have documented an open standard that is easy for publishers to adopt."

Facebook has reason to appease its publishers, especially as alternatives – Apple's News app, Google's AMP project – keep cropping up. But that said, NewsWhip data from November showed that stories from the New York Times on Instant Articles were three times more likely to be shared, giving publishers more reason to take advantage of the opening to join.