Facebook Will Launch Instant Article Feature For Publishers In April

The world's largest social networking platform, Facebook, revealed that its Instant Article program will be open to all the publishers from April 12. The company will be making an official announcement at its F8 developer conference, that is scheduled to be held on April 12th and 13th at San Francisco.

Facebook had introduced the instant articles feature last year. The Instant Articles "makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles. They also provide an enriched reading experience and make the content more fluid and interesting. They also consists of features such as image zoom, autoplay videos, interactive maps and audio captions". The Instant Article feature will felicitate the publishers to sell advertisements in their articles and keep the revenue, or use Facebook's Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. Publishers will also be able to track data and traffic through comScore and other tools.

In an official blog post, Josh Roberts, product manager said, "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."

The Wall Street Journal notes that the move could vastly expand Facebook’s wide variety of content, which in turn could potentially result in users spending more time on the site, making it a more attractive destination for advertisers. Some publishers that participated in the initial testing phase remain wary of becoming too dependent on Facebook, but others say that Instant Articles generate the same amount of ad revenue on a per-view basis as their own mobile sites.

Facebook Instant Articles are presently available for Android and iOS users.