Meta will no longer support its Instant Articles format in the Facebook app in early 2023, according to Axios. The quick-loading article format ( Instant Article ) was first introduced in 2015, but Meta is taking a larger step away from news-oriented initiatives.
Meta has informed its media partners that in six months (April 2023), Facebook will no longer support Instant Articles, according to Erin Miller, Meta’s spokesperson. After support ends, news links on Facebook will take users to a publisher’s mobile site.
Meta recently decided to pull back some of its investments in Facebook’s News tab and Bulletin newsletter product. Bulletin, Meta’s newsletter platform, will be shut down by early 2023, the company said this month.
“According to Miller, less than 3% of what people see on Facebook’s Feed now posts with links to news stories,” she said in a statement. “As we said earlier this year, as a business, it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t match user preferences.” Meta is instead trying to make Facebook’s Feed function more like TikTok’s, by prioritizing algorithmic recommendations of content you might like.
Not only has Meta made major alterations to its fast-loading article format; Google no longer requires articles to be created in AMP to be featured in the “Top Stories” section and instead focuses on the “page experience” to rank search results.
