NEW YORK — Facebook will be getting rid of Instant Articles after introducing the format for publishers to “create fast and interactive articles” on the platform. A notification to publishers announced that Facebook will stop supporting the feature by April 2023.
“Starting in mid-April 2023, Instant Articles will no longer be available. Until then, you will still have access to insights and monetization related to your Instant Articles. As of October 14, 2022, Instant Articles will be available only to existing partners,” wrote Meta to publishers.
If you’re not familiar with what Instant Articles are, they’re basically native HTML documents intended to load especially quickly on Facebook’s mobile application.
Facebook boasted that Instant Articles would “load and display four times faster than the standard mobile web”. It also gave publishers the ability to insert their own ads.
Meta getting rid of this format could mean that they’re going to focus more on video-related content rather than article-based journalism. According to a Meta spokesperson, “currently less than 3 per cent of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed is posts with links to news articles”.
