After seven years of dutifully serving up fast news and meandering listicles, Meta is shutting down its instant articles service. Meta has been shifting towards video and away from hard news.
In an email to Gizmodo Friday, a Meta spokesman confirmed that it will stop supporting Instant Articles in mid-April. Publishers have six months to figure out alternatives. The traffic that would have stayed on Facebook will now go to the publisher's web pages.
Facebook Instant Articles were designed to load fast on mobile. According to Facebook, Instant Articles would load and display four times faster than the standard mobile web. Back in 2015, when Facebook was one of the biggest names in town for reading news, it made sense for news publishers to use that app.
Publishers wanted access to the platform's immense audience and didn't want to deal with slow loading mobile pages. The proposition came at a cost. In order to get quicker load times, partners needed to host their content on Facebook's server. The pitch said that the scale and additional eyeballs from appearing on Facebook's mobile app would be good for the company. When it launched, Instant Articles gave publishers the ability to insert their own ads or have Facebook's highly coveted ad network called "Audience Network" automatically place ads
That arrangement doesn't make sense anymore.
Less than 3% of what people see in Facebook's Feed are posts with links to news articles, according to a spokesman. It doesn't make sense to over invest in areas that don't align with user preferences
The rise of TikTok has shown users'increasing appetite for short form video content over text based articles, something Meta's learned the hard way. After weathering years of criticism from activists and academics, Facebook has shown less and less interest in supporting news on its platform. Earlier this year, it was reported that Facebook wouldn't pay publishers for their content appearing on its News Tab.
After Meta decided to pull the plug on Instant Articles, they were still on life support. The format was banned by most major news providers when it first launched, but it lost popularity when Facebook decided to make video a priority. Publishers fought for scraps of digital advertising revenue as a result of the reorientation. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, more than half of the publications listed as original partners with Facebook Instant Articles had abandoned the format by early last year.
Other less well-known sites jumped in to fill some of the gaps left by the departure of authoritative news sites. 29 Facebook pages and associated websites were found to be pushing out blatantly false news stories.
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