Facebook to launch Instant Articles to make it easier to access news online
13 May 2015
Facebook is making it even easier to access news articles online. It would introduce Instant Articles, which would offer news organisations the chance to create interactive content that was much simpler and faster to read on Facebook via a mobile device.
According to commentators, though news organisations stood to gain from the development, attracting young audiences, it would also end up handing even more power to the social network.
The system would involve the hosting of the content on Facebook servers.
National Geographic, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, the Guardia and the BBC were among the organsatisn, which would now try out the new system.
Instant Articles would, as the name suggests, appear instantly rather than the users having to wait as they followed a link.
Facebook's chief product officer Chris Cox told the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent over a video link to Cox's Menlo Park office that Facebook thought the most important thing here was speed.
He added the obvious lesson the social network kept on learning was that on a mobile phone, the most important thing was immediacy.
According to Facebook, it could take as long as eight seconds for a news article to load on a phone under the existing system.
In a demo of Instant Articles, Jones was shown a National Geographic piece that filled the screen at once, and came with a number extras - photos one could "like" individually, embedded videos that autoplayed, pop-out charts and maps.
Facebook said it was providing publishers with the tools to make their content more engaging.
Nine news publishers have signed up with Facebook for ''Instant Articles.''
Instant Articles would allow news content to load more than 10 times faster than standard mobile web articles Facebook said in a blog on its website.
"Instant Articles lets them (publishers) deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models," according to Cox.
The news publishers could either sell and embed advertisements in the articles and keep all of the revenue, or let Facebook to sell ads.
The social networking company would also allow the news companies to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools.
According to Facebook, the other launch partners for Instant Articles included NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC New, Spiegel, and Bild.
