The company confirmed to Engadget that support for Instant Articles will end in mid-April. It brought the format to Facebook in 2015 to help news articles load quickly on mobile devices. However, the company is putting more resources into its core products — incl.
“Currently, less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in their Facebook feeds are posts with links to news articles,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “As we said earlier this year, as a business, it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t meet user preferences.” The company noted that its users are spending more time watching videos, especially short ones, and they want See less news and political content on Facebook.
, who first reported the news, noting that Meta has been reducing its investment in news content, such as it gives US publishers in news The tags contain their articles. The company also said last week that it would.
A mid-April timeline for ending Instant Articles support would give publishers six months to reassess their Facebook strategy. After that, when you click a link to a news article on Facebook’s mobile app, you’ll be taken to the publisher’s own website.
Meta notes that since the introduction of Instant Articles, the mobile web experience has widely improved due to faster internet speeds and more powerful devices. As such, it suggests that these upgrades make Instant Articles unnecessary for many who access text-based stories. However, you may soon discover that certain articles take longer to appear on your screen, depending on the page load of the publisher’s site.
What Google stopped doing last year is valuable to news publishers. The company said it would stop prioritizing news articles using the format in its search rankings.
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