Back in 2015, Facebook introduced instant articles that quickly load articles to offer a better reading experience. Now the company has decided to kill Instant articles. Meta has told all media partners that Facebook will stop supporting Instant Articles in six months. Links shared on Facebook will redirect users to the publisher’s mobile site.
Facebook’s Instant articles used to load articles 4 times faster than standard links. The company also had given publishers an option to monetize Instant articles to keep earning from their content.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that less than 3% of people see links to news articles in their Facebook feed. So, it doesn’t make sense to invest in a feature that is not being used by the user. Now when people prefer watching videos, the company wants to focus on video content.
Meta has also started reducing its investment in news content after it saw a boost in video content. It stopped paying US publishers for including their articles on the News tab. The company is also shutting down the Bulletin newsletter platform.
Google also made a similar effort by launching the AMP format in search. It also prioritizes AMP pages in news results. Now Google has also stopped prioritizing AMP in news articles and a lot of publishers also moved away from AMP.
