Meta Closes Instant Articles

Meta is about to do away with its instant articles. From mid-April 2023 they will no longer be available.

Meta will stop releasing Instant Articles in mid-April. The information was confirmed by Engadget. This format was introduced to Facebook in 2015 to make news articles load faster on mobile devices. However, Menlo Park, a completely restructured firm, is now reorganizing its resources in its most important products, including drum videos.

Meta will stop releasing instant articles

“Currently, less than 3% of what Facebook users see in their feed are posts with links to news,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “And as we’ve said before, it doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint to over-invest in something that doesn’t align with user preferences.” The company said its users spend more time watching videos, especially short ones, and want to see less news and other political content on Facebook.

Axios, which first reported the information, explained that Meta has been cutting its investment in news content for some time. American publishers, for example, are no longer paid to post their articles on the News tab. Last week, the firm also formalized the termination of its newsletter platform for early 2023.

From mid-April 2023 there will be no more

Thus, publishers have six months, until mid-April, to rethink their Facebook strategy with the disappearance of Instant Articles. After that, when you click on a news article link in the Facebook mobile apps, you will be redirected to the publisher’s website.

Meta also noted that since the launch of Instant Articles, the mobile network has improved significantly in terms of device speed and performance. In fact, Instant Articles have become less useful for many users. However, you should soon notice an increase in the loading time of certain articles, depending on the type of page of the site on which you are reading the specified article.

Google made a similar move last year by phasing out the AMP format for new publishers. The American giant also explained that it will stop highlighting them in search results.