Despite potentially undermining their own businesses, nine media companies have agreed to directly publish news articles to Facebook starting on Wednesday.
The company claims that articles published using the system will arrive up to ten times faster than ‘normal’ news links, which are hosted on publishers’ websites.
They don’t look vastly different from normal news stories, but are delivered via Facebook’s servers, speeding up the time it takes to download them on mobile.
As it stands, it takes about eight seconds to load articles in News Feed.
The new feature called Instant Articles ‘Makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles,’ Facebook said in a blog post on its website.
It added publishers can sell advertisements in their articles and keep the revenue, or use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory.
Publishers will also be able to track data and traffic through comScore and another tools.
Facebook announced nine partners who are to begin publishing using the system – The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
Agencies/Canadajournal
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