By Josh Roberts, Product Manager
As previously announced, today at F8 we are officially opening the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any type, any size, anywhere in the world. We’re also sharing new data illustrating how Instant Articles is better for people and publishers, introducing a number of partnerships with publishing tools and analytics providers to support the publishing process, and sharing more detail on how branded content is supported in Instant Articles.
Publishers can sign up at instantarticles.fb.com and join the program today.
Instant Articles Program Data
The response to Instant Articles has been tremendous: More than one thousand publishers worldwide are officially part of the program, and at every step of the way, we see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook:
Additionally for many people around the world, it’s challenging to get news on mobile simply because it takes too long to load. We’ve invested heavily in optimizing performance on Android, with the goal of providing the best mobile reading experience for people everywhere, no matter where they are in the world or what connection or device they’re on. In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and others, we’ve found that people on slower connections read 20-40% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average as a result.
New Instant Articles Partners and Tools
As more publishers join the program, we want to make sure the process of creating and managing Instant Articles is seamless. We’ve partnered with a group of open source platforms, analytics providers, and third-party developers to build tools that help publishers create, manage, and monitor performance of their Instant Articles. We encourage you to learn more about their solutions here:
- Publishing Tools
WordPress, Drupal, Atavist, Medium, Perk Distributed, RebelMouse, ShareThis, Sovrn, Steller, Tempest - Analytics Tools
Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, comScore, Nielsen, Parsely, SimpleReach
Branded Content in Instant Articles
Publishers can now create branded content as Instant Articles and share these posts on Facebook with a tag indicating the sponsor of the story. As we roll out initial support for branded content in Instant Articles, publishers can take advantage of the following options:
- Visually distinguish branded content from editorial content using our article styling tools.
- Customize text in the byline and kicker to indicate content sponsors.
- Include a sponsor logo on the first screen through a native toolset that is coming soon.
To learn more about branded content on Facebook in general, please see our announcement from last week.
One of our principles from the very beginning of Instant Articles has been to work collaboratively with our publishing partners to understand their needs and shape the product, and we want to thank them for their continued feedback. We look forward to continuing this journey of informing people and connecting them to the news that matters to them, together.
* If you are a developer and are interested in developing tools for Instant Articles, you can learn more about our API and SDK here.
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