Facebook removes Instant Articles from Messenger App

FBtutorial.com | Facebook News — Facebook has removed Instant Articles support from its Messenger app, a new report by TechCrunch reveals. This comes just a little over a year after Facebook first introduced the feature back in 2015.

Instant Articles Facebook Messenger

Instant Articles (IA) is a feature Facebook introduced in 2015 for mobile devices, as a way for news publishers to distribute their content to the mass of users on the social networking site.

Facebook’s Instant Articles claim to load 10 times faster than the traditional web, but it seems weak performance means Instant Articles struggles to grow.

“As we continue to refine and improve Instant Articles — and in order to have the greatest impact on people and publishers — we’re focusing our investment in Instant Articles in the Facebook core app and are no longer offering Instant Articles in Messenger,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The spokesperson also said Messenger would remain a channel for “news consumption experiences,” with thousands of bots — including ones from news publishers — that can answer basic questions or ping users with news alerts.

Facebook also faced monetization issues with Instant Articles. Major publishers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have reportedly begun distancing themselves from Instant Articles because of concerns that they were losing subscription money with little payoff in terms of audience growth.

In an effort to conserve the platform, Facebook says it would also add subscriptions and paywall content later this year.

Instant Articles was originally designed to run in the News Feed, but a year ago Facebook expanded IA to Messenger as part of a wider strategy to enhance content on its popular messaging platform, which today has over 1.2 billion users.