We all have this impatience that if a site takes more than a few seconds to load we give up and move on to the next thing. Unless the site in question is for filing tax returns, it’s never that serious, that story or article can always be read next time or we can always go elsewhere and access it faster.
Thanks to the ever-growing size of web pages as a result of being bogged down by ads and other content that publishers and their partners like ad networks keep on throwing on top, the experience on mobile when reading news articles can be disappointing and downright frustrating. Don’t get me started on the amount of time and data wasted in the process.
To address this and encourage its users to consume more of the content shared on its platform, Facebook debuted Instant Articles in May last year with a handful of news publishers before eventually rolling out the same to everyone this year.
However, one can only access Instant Articles on the main Facebook application on either Android or iOS.
Starting a few hours ago, Facebook has announced the addition of its messaging platform Messenger to the Instant Articles access fold.
Any Facebook Instant Article shared on Messenger will have the usual lightning bolt that indicates that an article is hosted by Facebook for speedy loading.
Messenger is one of the top social apps in the world at the moment with over 900 million monthly active users. As such, this is a significant move in widening the scope and reach of Instant Articles and is something that Facebook will likely use to its advantage as it woos more partners (publishers) to its platforms.
Instant Articles on Messenger are already live on Android and are coming soon to iOS according to Facebook’s Vice President of Messaging Products, David Marcus.
