Facebook announced the beta launch of Instant Articles in the Philippines. As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. Currently, the average news story takes an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.
As of today, Philippines publishers now live include: ABS-CBN News, GMA Network, GMA News, INQUIRER.net, Rappler
“Expanding Instant Articles in the Philippines is a significant milestone for the product and for each of our early launch partners,” said Andy Mitchell, Director of Global Media Partnerships, Facebook. “Instant Articles has been designed with extensive feedback from publishers, and we’re excited to bring this collaboration to our publishing partners in Asia to help them distribute fast, interactive articles to their readers in the Facebook app.”
Every Instant Article has a lightning bolt, so when you see that lightning bolt in News Feed, you know it is going to have a fast, interactive experience. Along with a faster experience, Instant Articles introduces a suite of interactive features that allow publishers to bring their stories to life in new ways. Zoom in and explore high-resolution photos by tilting your phone. Watch auto-play videos come alive as you scroll through stories. Explore interactive maps, listen to audio captions, and even like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line.
We designed Instant Articles to give publishers control over their stories, brand experience and monetization opportunities. Publishers in Asia are able to sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, or they can choose to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. Publishers will also have the ability to track data and traffic through their current analytics tools.
“We worked closely with our early media partners in the Philippines to begin rolling out Instant Articles locally. Internationally, publishers are already sharing thousands of Instant Articles on Facebook each day, and looking ahead we’re excited to partner with more publishers here to bring the Instant Articles experience to more people,” said Ken Cheung, Head of Media Partnerships, APAC, Facebook.
The Instant Articles experience is seamless for readers they are simply the articles already in your Facebook News Feed, made faster and more beautiful. When a friend or publisher shares a link on Facebook, the enhanced experience is displayed automatically if an Instant Article version is available.
Instant Articles uses the languages of the web and systems publishers already work on RSS and HTML. We have documented an open standard that is easy for publishers to adopt.
Globally, Instant Articles is now available to all iPhone users. Android will launch later this year, with a small public beta available now. Following the beta launch, Instant Articles will be open to a wider group of publishers in the months to come.
For more information, see this blog post: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2015/09/22/instant-articles-from-CMS/