Facebook Insta

After months of rumors, Facebook today unveiled “Instant Articles”, a program that natively hosts publishers’ content in its app’s News Feed so users don’t have to click out and wait for websites to load. Instant Articles debuts today with rich-media stories from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and six other outlets that will be globally visible from Facebook’s iPhone app.

You can check out Instant Articles for yourself by visiting the feature’s Facebook Page on an iPhone. For more on Facebook’s  strategy, read our feature piece: Facebook’s Quest To Absorb The Internet.

Assuaging publishers’ fears that Facebook twitch downloader would keep all the data, the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics. Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Instant Articles won’t receive preferential treatment from Facebook’s News Feed sorting algorithm just because of their format. But if users click, like, comment, and share Instant Articles more often than others, they may show up higher and more frequently in feed like any piece of popular content. That could incentivize, or implicitly force, more publishers to adopt the new hosted format.

3-Map (new)

Beyond just loading faster, Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats that make Instant Articles feel like a publisher’s website. But Facebook is also providing vivid media options like embedding zoomable photos, videos, and maps with audio captions, plus contextual ‘Ambient Videos’. Justin Osofsky, the company’s VP Of Global Operations and Media Partnerships, says publishers “can have the same tools that an app developer has. They’re not stuck with what the mobile web can offer.”

If the Instant Articles test is well received, Facebook hopes to add more publishers in the coming weeks with the goal of making it available to any outlet that shares stories on Facebook.

tl;dr – Facebook is trying to plug the holes where users leak out. Slow mobile web article load times lead people to leave its app. Speeding up the reading experience by subsuming it could make sure people stay on Facebook connecting with friends, discovering content, and seeing ads. But the program further indebts publishers to Facebook, and they have to play by its rules.

Designed On Paper

Many think Facebook’s dedicated news reader Paper was a failure because it wasn’t a hit with tens of millions of users. But like Camera, Slingshot, and Facebook’s other standalone apps, it was designed to provide Facebook with insights about user behavior that it could bring back to its main app. This is how Facebook figured out photo filters and stickers, and now Paper has taught it about the stylized reading experience publishers want to provide.

Instant Articles borrows from the branded article covers pioneered in Facebook Paper

Instant Articles borrows from the branded article covers pioneered in Facebook Paper

Now, Paper will still be supported, but its team’s leaders including project manager Michael Reckhow and designer Mike Matas are behind Instant Articles. “We’ve brought a bunch of the learnings [from Paper] into this product” Reckhow tells me at Facebook headquarters. That includes stylized cover images and fonts that evoke the publisher’s brand.

The project started with the theses that “speed is often then most important feature of what we build on a mobile phone” Reckhow tells me. The company saw a massive increase in usage and improvement of reviews when it doubled the speed of its iOS app in 2012.

“We have gone through and optimized and sped up all the core experiences of using Facebook: loading News Feed, loading photos, loading videos” Reckhow explains. “The last thing that takes a long time to load in your News Feed is articles.” Matas relays “We’ve all had the frustration of just looking at a blank screen and waiting for something to load”, and notes “On average it takes over eight seconds to load.” That’s an eternity on mobile that causes people to close the app in frustration.

Instant Articles load 10x faster than the mobile web

So nine months ago, Facebook devised the plan for Instant Articles. As soon as an Instant Article is algorithmically picked to show up in the News Feed, a rich cover image and the article itself is pre-loaded into Facebook’s native app.

When you tap one, instead of having to wait for an internal browser window opening the website to load, the screen slides over immediately revealing the hosted content. Matas says they load “about 10x faster than the mobile web”, and in my demo on Wi-Fi, it took just a quarter-second or so. Not enough time to get bored and leave Facebook.

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