Facebook reported that the Instant Articles project will end in April 2023. Launched in Brazil in December 2015, the feature allows the publication of content in a faster-loading format via mobile and within the application.
According to Meta, the company that controls Facebook, until then the product will remain available only to sites that already use it, with limited support, and new pages will not be accepted.
Today, when a user clicks on an AI article (marked with a blue ray on the post), the page loads faster within the social network.
With the end of technology, the click will direct the reader directly to the mobile site, as is already the case with browsing outside the app and equivalent to using it on the desktop.
When it was launched, Instant Articles (open to any type of site) faced resistance from newspapers and news sites for not allowing content monetization via paywall. On the paywall, a screen is displayed that asks for a subscription (or subscriber login), which is one of the main ways in which newspapers are paid for what they produce.
Instant Articles was a reaction to Google’s creation of the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format months earlier. In it, lighter pages of sites that adopt the special version are offered to users who search by cell phone. Unlike AI, AMP loads an original page from the site and, from the beginning, allowed the use of paywall.
In the case of the IA, it took almost three years for the first tests with the payment wall, and three and a half years for the subscription model to be offered for Brazilian vehicles. In January 2022, the paywall on Instant Articles was discontinued.
The end of IA comes in the wake of another Meta announcement that greatly affects journalism and has not even reached Brazil. In July of this year, the “News Tab” (news feed, in free translation) was extinguished in the United States. American vehicles that posted on the special timeline had compensation contracts.
In a note, at the time, the company expressed itself with the same position as now: “Currently, less than 3% of what people see in the Facebook Feed in the world are publications with links to news articles. year, from a business point of view, it doesn’t make sense to devote a lot of investment to areas that are not aligned with user preferences.”
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