Facebook has announced Instant Articles, a mobile app feature (for iPhone only, currently) where news from The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News and German news publishers Spiegel and Bild will be displayed inside the mobile app. It’s worth noting that Facebook has already reduced the reach of news updates significantly with the intent of trying to get publishers to pay for better reach. With Instant Articles, will the availability of news articles grow and their reach increase for publishers who have signed up for it? Is it the case that now publishers being forced to sign up so that their article reach is extended? Instant Articles is interesting because it basically gives Facebook the potential to curate a user’s newsfeed to push articles from its partner publications. There is also the chance that Facebook could down rate (push lower) the content coming from other publishers who did not sign up for Instant Articles. Publications may lose out on important data about their readers when users visit their websites, and maim their ability to to carry out specific and targeted advertising, and all that data on user behaviour may end up benefiting Facebook which isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to data privacy. Facebook claims that – web articles on the Facebook app take an average of 8 seconds to load, which is the slowest single content type on Facebook and – Instant Articles will load content in less than a…
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Facebook’s Instant Articles lets you load news from select publishers faster; what about others?
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