Facebook: Opening Up Instant Articles to All Publishers

We're excited to announce that on April 12th at Facebook's F8 conference, we will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world. 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.

We built Instant Articles to solve a specific problem—slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones. This is a problem that impacts publishers of all sizes, especially those with audiences where low connectivity is an issue. With that in mind, our goal from the beginning was to open up Instant Articles to all publishers and we're excited to be able to do that in a way that makes it fast and easy for all publishers to reach their audiences on Facebook.

Media organizations and journalists are an integral part of Facebook, and we’re committed to delivering products that will create the best experience for publishers and their readers. With Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network. Additionally, 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.

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. We encourage all interested publishers to review our documentation and prepare for open availability in April, at which point they will be able to share this fast, interactive experience with their readers.

Facebook's goal is connect people to the stories, posts, videos or photos that matter most to them. Opening up Instant Articles will allow any publisher to tell great stories, that load quickly, to people all over the world. With Instant Articles, they can do this while retaining control over the experience, their ads and their data.

*Blog post link: http://media.fb.com/2016/02/17/opening-up-instant-articles/
Author: Josh Roberts, Product Manager