Social media giant launches "Instant Articles" feature

After several months of rumors, Facebook unveiled “Instant Articles”, a program that natively hosts publishers content in its app’s news feed, today.

Instant Articles launched with rich media stories from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and six other media outlets that will be globally visible for the social networks' iPhone app.

Assuaging publishers’ fears that Facebook would keep all the data, the social network will share analytics, and Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools like comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics. Ads can appear inside Instant Articles, with publishers keeping 100% of revenue if they sell them, and Facebook keeps its standard 30% if it sells the ads, as the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

There are no commitments from any publisher to run a certain amount of articles with Facebook, and any publisher can walk at any point.

“We’re going in with our eyes open,” says New York Times CEO Mark Thompson. His paper will publish a single story on Facebook Wednesday.

Facebook says it won’t alter its algorithm to favor “Instant Articles” over any other kind of content. But given their novelty, and the fact they’re designed to be eye-catching, it seems very likely that these things will get lots of attention at the start. Beyond just loading faster, Facebook will parse HTML and RSS to display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats that make Instant Articles feel like a publisher’s website.

But Facebook is also providing vivid media options like embedding zoomable photos, videos, and maps with audio captions, plus contextual ‘Ambient Videos’. Justin Osofsky, the company’s VP Of Global Operations and Media Partnerships, says publishers “can have the same tools that an app developer has. They’re not stuck with what the mobile web can offer.”