DUBAI: Meta is to end its Instant Articles feature, which was launched in 2015 to make news load faster on the Facebook mobile app.
Instant Articles will be discontinued from April, giving news publishers time to adjust, a report on the Axios website said. Traffic from links will instead be directed to news publishers’ mobile websites.
“Currently less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed are posts with links to news articles,” a Meta spokesperson said.
“And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn’t make sense to over-invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.”
Improvements in the mobile web experience have made platform-specific products like Instant Articles largely obsolete, Axios said.
The move appears to be part of Meta’s reduction of investment in news content. Earlier this month, the company announced that it would end Bulletin, its newsletter subscription service for journalists and writers, by early next year.
“Bulletin has allowed us to learn about the relationship between creators and their audiences and how to better support them in building their community on Facebook,” a spokesman said.
“While this off-platform product itself is ending, we remain committed to supporting these and other creators’ success and growth on our platform.”
Earlier this year, Meta told news partners in the US that the company no longer planned to pay publishers for their content to run on Facebook’s News tab, according to the Axios report.
Before that Campbell Brown, who leads Meta’s media partnerships, told employees that Facebook was reallocating resources to focus more on the creator economy, according to the Wall Street Journal.