If you rely on Facebook for consuming news, you may have come across an Instant Articles either randomly or by choice. They are usually indicated by a lightning icon on the link and when you tap them, the articles load pretty fast, hence the term “Instant Articles.”
Instant Articles is a proprietary product from Facebook that formats articles from publishers fully without loss of pictures or video but can be loaded way faster by the audience on Facebook. It was introduced May last year and has been on a gradual rollout until yesterday where it was released to all publishers worldwide.
During the worldwide release, Facebook also revealed interesting statistics about the Instant Articles program:
- There are more than a thousand publishers worldwide who use Instant Articles.
- 70% of people are less likely to abandon an Instant Article once they click it thanks to its fast loading times
- People share Instant Articles 30% more likely than mobile web articles on average.
- Instant Articles generate 20% more clicks than normal .
- Facebook found out in countries like Brazil, Mexico, India and the Philippines, people on slower connections read 20-40% more Instant Articles than the traditional web articles.
From the statistics above, you can see that Facebook is trying to show developers and publishers alike that it is beneficial to sign up to Instant Articles or make products that are tied to the service. They have targeted both self hosting publishers and those that are hosted on WordPress where the latter is important since WordPress powers 25% of the web. You will be seeing more Instant Articles populating your Newsfeed soon because this is the future and slow loading web pages are the past.
