Facebook recently opened up their ‘ Instant Articles” feature to all publishers. So what is Facebook Instant Articles? Instant Articles is a mobile publishing format that enables news publishers to distribute articles to Facebook's app that load and display as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web. The feature is designed to help publishers of all sizes reach the fast audiences available on Facebook.
The full blown rollout of this feature has been hailed by smaller publishers and criticized by larger players like the New York Times and Reuters who see this feature as the death knell to their business models. No matter how you look at it, Instant Articles has many benefits to help publishers of all shapes and sizes capture and maintain an engaged audience.
Here are 4 reasons to signup for Instant Articles.
1. Faster loading articles
Research shows that audiences hate to wait for web pages to load, especially on their mobile devices. Even a slight delay in loading times will cause up to a 7% drop in readership. Instant Articles helps solve this problem by making sure your articles load super fast in mobile.
2. Flexible monetization options
The key driver of Facebook’s ad revenue growth has been mobile. The company derives about 78% of its revenue from mobile ads. The idea is to really build out this revenue driver by democratizing content. This means your content. To help motivate publishers to get involved, Facebook allows small and large publishers to serve up their own ads and keep 100% of revenue from that . The company also gives publishers the option to take a 70% share of revenue when the publisher allows Facebook to display inventory from their Ad network alongside articles.
3. Huge Audience
This point is a pretty obvious one. We all know that Facebook has billions of users. What makes Facebook different from most of the social networks that came earlier is that the company has found a way to keep their users very active. A large portion of Facebook’s users spend hundreds of hours a week exploring the network. Mobile has helped tremendously in keeping users engaged. This is the reason why by publishing your articles or blog posts via Instant Articles, you open your content up to be seen and read by potentially, millions of people.
4. Complete Brand control
As a publisher, you have complete control of your content and branding when using Instant Articles. You have control over where and how your logo appears within your articles and can completely customize how your entire articles appear. You can choose where in your article you want your ads to appear and what size ads are appropriate for you. You also get to pick how many ads you want to show up in your content.
