Meta is killing its Instant Articles format for news stories

Meta will end support for Instant Articles by mid-April, the company has confirmed to Engadget. He introduced the format to Facebook in 2015 to help news articles load quickly on mobile devices. However, the company is reportedly restructuring and allocating more resources to its core products, including video-focused features such as Reels.

"Currently, less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook's News Feed are posts that link to news stories," a Meta spokesperson told Engage. "And as we said earlier this year, as a business, it doesn't make sense to invest too much in areas that don't align with user preferences." The company pointed out that its users are spending more time watching videos, especially short videos, and that they want to see less news and political content on Facebook.

Axios, which broke the news first, noted that Meta had reduced its investments in news content, for example by ending payments it provides to US publishers for included their articles in the "News" tab. The company also announced last week that it would shut down the Bulletin newsletter platform by early 2023.

The mid-April deadline for the end of support for Instant Articles will give publishers six months to reevaluate their Facebook strategies. After that, when you tap a link to a news article on Facebook's mobile apps, you'll be redirected to the publishers' websites.

Meta noted that since the launch of Instant Articles, the mobile web experience has vastly improved thanks to faster internet speeds and more powerful devices. As such, he suggested that these upgrades have made Instant Articles unnecessary for many people who access text-based stories. However, you may soon find that some articles take longer to appear on your screen, depending on the page load of publishers' websites.

Google actually made a similar change last year when it no longer made its AMP format attractive to news publishers. The company said it will stop prioritizing news articles using this format in its search rankings.

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