Facebook has finally launched the Instant Articles on Android fully. The Instant Articles was introduced earlier and in October Facebook launched the service on iOS and a public beta on Android. Today Facebook finally launched the Instant articles on Android fully with more than 350 publications signed up for the service. All major and notable publications joined the instant articles to push their articles to more eye balls.
The Instant Articles is a service where news and articles from selected publications will be hosted by Facebook so that they load more quickly when users click on those articles. The instant articles loads articles 10 times faster than the publication hosted articles. Users will abandon the article if it takes time to load on their mobile phones, to address this issue Facebook has launched instant articles and publishers are naturally interested in the service because it brings more eye balls to their articles. As part of the agreement Facebook will monetize the articles with out losing user experience and as they are hosted on Facebook they will load faster.
Facebook first launched Instant Articles on May for few users and in this October it launched fully on iOS and as a public beta for Android. Facebook announced that more that 350 publications joined already and more than 100 are already publishing daily and more are joining daily. If it proves value for the current publishers it is going to attract more publishers in the feature.
Google also launched Accelerated Mobile Pages project as an initiative to make the mobile web pages faster. As more and more users are using smartphones to consume news and information it is necessary to make the pages load faster to be in the loop. Facebook has an advantage here as users news reading is happening on Facebook these days either through apps, discovery or through friends sharing of articles. With the Instant Articles Facebook doesn’t want them to go to any other aggregator and want them glued to the site.
This is essentially a “fast lane” for things linked to from Facebook, which is exactly what one of those big internet bills was about that everyone was against (except applied to the entire internet, not just Facebook), so it’s also kind of funny to see them doing this. It’s genius, I have to admit.