Facebook Messenger Now Supports Instant Articles

Facebook’s attempt to become the de facto platform that publishers, large and small, publish on.

With the advent of smartphones and tablets, two things have definitely changed — our ability to “upgrade” our device’s capabilities (simply by downloading new apps whatever specific need we have) almost infinitely and secondly, the amount of content we consume every single day.

Content has become a raging industry, and is no longer limited to the usual “media” channels and sources.

Recognising the huge import of content in our lives, Facebook has been make tons of unobtrusive changes to its platforms and apps, that facilitate consumption. One of the more impactful changes was the launch of ‘Instant Articles’ about a year ago. Facebook created technology and some key algorithms to that surfaced interesting content and ensured it loaded faster than traditional articles.

These articles, which were hosted on Facebook’s servers, were designed to create a provide better experience than the typical 8-second wait for an article to load on the mobile web. And it worked. There was a noticeable increase in readership; conversely, other (non-Instant Articles) saw some decline in readership.

The evolution of Instant Articles in the field of news domination was termed as a “watershed moment” by some. Accusations flew that publishers would now be more dependent on the platform that they won’t be able to control. Those concerns might have had been valid, but it didn’t stop big partners from signing up.

Now, the Facebook Messenger too supports Instant Articles, especially on Android devices.

As a Facebook representative said, “Since launching Instant Articles to publishers around the world, we’ve seen clear evidence they provide a better reading experience for people on Facebook. People are responding to the faster, more immersive experience, so we’re excited to bring Instant Articles to even more mobile surfaces across Facebook.”

The choice of Android OS as a starting point is not an innocent one; it is a marker of the wide reach of the Android users.

Publishers will now have to sign up through a third party plugin, which support platforms like WordPress and Drupal, or they can use the Instant Articles API or an RSS feed.

In addition to Facebook’s own articles, items will appear up to 10 times faster and the communication application will offer the same reading experience as the full featured social app.

When someone shares a link with you, a lightning bolt icon will let you know that it’s available as one of the quick-to-load stories, meaning you won’t have to wait for it to appear like a regular ol’ web article.

There are ads inside the Instant Articles and those will make the trip over to Messenger as well. As more and more people are now using Messenger to share entertaining content and information, Facebook says it found scope for adding the Instant Articles feature to its Messenger app.

“If you’re a publisher that has enabled Instant Articles, we’ll render the Instant Articles version of your article, whenever its URL is shared in Messenger”, said Facebook in its post announcing the new update.

While, the publishers who use Instant Articles get a cut of the advertising money made from their articles being on Facebook — it’s just not yet really known if that deal will allow publishers to make the same or more money than they do from their own original websites. However, now that Instant Articles are in Messenger, their popularity is only set to grow, especially considering the fact that Messenger boasts of a hefty 900 million users!

The list of launch partners includes NBC News, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, The Daily Mail, National Geographic, and the Washington Post.

Facebook has become a de facto platform for many to get their daily news, and internal data has shown that personal sharing on the site has reduced with more articles, news links being shared by users.

The reason to extend Instant Articles into Facebook Messenger is hence quite a obvious one. Go where the users are, and provide them experience that influence even the recipients to convert. And all this works to what may be Facebook’s end goal — become the de facto platform that publishers, large and small, publish on.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.