Facebook to open Instant Articles feature to all publishers

New York: Social media giant Facebook has announced plans to open up its Instant Articles programme to all publishers globally to give users a better and faster reading experience -- whether it is news, views or opinion pieces.

The announcement is expected to come during Facebook's "F8 Conference" in San Francisco on April 12.

"To date, we have been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook," Josh Roberts, product manager (Facebook) said in a statement. 

Facebook is making improvements according to the feedback it is getting and is building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly, he added.

Instant Articles was built to solve a specific problem -- slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones. 

With Instant Articles, publishers the world over can have full control over the look of their stories as well as data and ads. 

They will have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100 percent of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems or they can monetise their content through the Facebook Audience Network. 

"This is a problem that impacts publishers of all sizes, especially those with audiences where low connectivity. With that in mind, our goal was to open up Instant Articles to all publishers and we are excited to be able to do in a way that makes it fast and easy for all publishers to reach their audiences on Facebook," Roberts noted. 

Additionally, the publishers can use their existing web-based analytics systems to track article traffic or use third-party providers. 

"They can do all this while accessing a rich suite of multimedia tools to create dynamic, interactive stories, that will load quickly everywhere on Facebook, regardless of where in the world their readers are," the Facebook official noted.

Publishers can also join by building a system based on the tools they already use. The company has invited the interested publishers to review the documentation and prepare for open availability in April.