Dive Brief:
- Facebook is preparing to go live with its Instant Articles content feature for more than the select few publishers it partnered with during testing.
- Media outlets, including the New York Times and the Atlantic, are planning to take advantage of the feature as soon as it’s available.
- Both the New York Times and NBC News expect to publish as many as 30 daily articles directly to Facebook’s newsfeed.
Dive Insight:
When Facebook initially announced its Instant Articles feature, there was speculation around how publishers would react. Instant Articles allows publishers to post content directly into the social media platform’s newsfeed rather than send Facebook users to outside websites in order to access the content. With the service imminently going live, that question has largely been answered with major media companies including the New York Times, NBC News and the Atlantic expected to immediately use the feature. Both the Atlantic and BuzzFeed will make most of their content available via Instant Articles.
Bob Cohn, president and CEO of the Atlantic, told Marketing Land, “We’re excited for the next phase. At the outset we’ll be putting most of our content into the feed and will closely monitor the effect.”
Even though Instant Articles keeps visitors tied to Facebook rather than reading the content on the publisher’s own sites, publishers can sell ads on the content keeping 100% of ad revenue instead of the 70% they receive when Facebook sells the ad space.
According to Facebook, Instant Articles content will load as much as ten times faster in its app than the standard mobile web.
