Instant Articles is Facebook’s proprietary news delivery platform that ushered in a new era of instantaneously loading articles. It even prompted Google to come up with its own fast loading articles platform which they named it AMP.
However, the Instant Articles platforms still has a long way to go and this hinges on a good relationship between Facebook and the publishers. One way for publishers to make more money on top of serving ads on Instagram is having some sort of paywall and it seems Facebook has heard the publisher’s requests to that regard.
According to The Street, Facebook’s Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown said that the company will launch a subscription based news products which will start on October.
The new product will be built on Facebook’s Instant Articles, which makes sense since the company has pushed this as the preferred mode of reading content on the site. The company will put up a paywall which will require readers to become subscribers of the platform after they had accessed 10 articles.
“One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that we want a subscription product,” Brown was quoted as saying, “we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook.”
This move will appease publishers who have actual paywalls on their websites and would like to extend the same treatment on their shared articles on Instant Articles. The same treatment can be extended to Google by the same publishers and we have to wait and see if Google will have a paywall product for the AMP platform.
