Facebook is rolling out its Instant Articles mobile publishing platform with its first round of Canadian publications. Over the next several weeks, Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Sportsnet, Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec will begin cross-publishing a selection of articles directly to Facebook’s mobile app.
Facebook first began beta-testing Instant Articles in May, with the goal of improving its users’ experience when reading linked articles on its mobile app. Rather than open the publisher’s content in Facebook’s built-in mobile browser, Facebook began hosting publisher content directly, so that it would load much faster when users accessed it.
Though initially only available for iOS devices, as of today Instant Articles is also now available on the Android version of Facebook’s app.
Quebecor titles Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec will release their first Instant Articles today, while Rogers’ three magazines will launch in the next two weeks. A large number of other publishers have signed up to begin testing the platform in 2016 including The Canadian Press, Diply, Global News, The Globe and Mail, Postmedia Network, The Toronto Star and CKNW.
“Our digital strategy is to reach our readers where they are on the device they use, whenever they want to read our content,” said Mathieu Turbide, director of web content at Le Journal de Montréal. He said Le Journal intends to test intensively to see how its readers react, with the aim of growing its social reach and increasing the amount of time readers spend with articles.
Steve Maich, SVP and GM of publishing at Rogers Media, said joining Instant Articles was a natural step in its evolution into a cross-platform content company. “We want to get our content in front of as many people as we possibly can,” he said. “We know content consumption is changing, and we know an awful lot of consumption is happening on social platforms, none of them bigger than Facebook,” he said.
Rogers has decided to start with its three biggest magazine titles, he said, and will extend it to other publications depending on which audiences and which content sees the most success. “The experience of reading our stuff on Facebook will improve, and obviously that opens up more opportunities to monetize that audience more effectively,” he added.
When it launched earlier this year, Instant Articles was met with some reticence, driven by fears that Facebook was trying to muscle in on publisher audiences and ad revenue. Facebook allayed many of those fears when it offered to give publishers 100% of ad revenue generated on Instant Articles pages and allowed them to measure their audience using third-party trackers like ComScore.
During the beta, Facebook faced further complaints about the low number of ads publishers were allowed to serve on Instant Articles pages, but it responded quickly with tweaks to appease publishers. In response to publisher demand it now also allows advertisers to run ads exclusively on Facebook-hosted publisher pages.
Maich said the trial is intended to be a collaborative test-and-learn experience, and that many features of the platform haven’t been finalized. “I’d characterize it as an ongoing conversation with Facebook about how content can live on this platform,” he said. “I don’t think anybody thinks that Instant Articles in its current iteration is the way it’s going to be forever … All of the conversations we’ve had [with Facebook] in the past year have been very positive in that way, and they seem genuinely interested in working with us and finding solutions that work for us, work for Facebook and most importantly work for the audience.”
Facebook director of global media partnerships Andy Mitchell said while numbers can’t be shared yet, his team has seen promising increases in user engagement with Instant Articles compared to linked web articles. Though Facebook has not changed its algorithm to favour Instant Articles, the company has said it is likely those articles would appear more often in users’ newsfeeds since they tend to drive more and deeper engagement and are shared more often organically.
Mitchell said Facebook’s primary objective with Instant Articles is to improve load times and optimize the user experience, and many publishers are focusing on simply replicating their web content on the platform. But as a secondary feature, Instant Articles also promises to help publishers to create more fluid and rich experiences for mobile users, through elements like swipeable image galleries and embedded autoplay video.
“We’ve created a lot of interactive features that aren’t available on the mobile web,” Mitchell said. “What we tried to do was to offer all the functionality that is accessible to publishers on other platforms, that the mobile web doesn’t support — so that they can create parity with the consumption experience on their native apps or even on desktop.”
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