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Facebook ‘Instant Articles’ — Writers To Get Paid By Facebook About 70 Percent Of Ad Revenue

By Paula Mooney
Published on: 14:01 PST, Feb 17, 2016

Facebook has announced that the company is opening up their “Instant Articles” program to more publishers than those listed on the Facebook page about “Instant Articles.” According to Facebook’s “Instant Articles” page, certain publications already provide instant articles as part of the program. Sites like the New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC News, the Atlantic, the Guardian, BBC News and others are already listed as part of the “Instant Articles” network.

“Thousands of Instant Articles are published on Facebook each day and are available to everyone who uses Facebook on iPhone and Android. Look for Instant Articles daily from these publishers and more.”

According to BuzzFeed, Facebook’s “Instant Articles” will open up to individual publishers as well as those larger and more established websites. However, even the smallest of publishers will need a website to link to upon creating their “Instant Articles,” because Facebook won’t allow the “Instant Articles” publisher to publish via Facebook only. However, it needn’t be a fancy website — it can simply be a website with articles that may get a boatload of views via the Facebook “Instant Articles” medium.

In the Facebook article titled “Opening Up Instant Articles to All Publishers,” published on February 17, and written by Josh Roberts, a Product Manager at Facebook, the explanation for creating “Instant Articles” is given in detail.

“We’re excited to announce that on April 12th at Facebook’s F8 conference, we will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world. To date, we’ve been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. While we were getting feedback and making improvements to Instant Articles, in parallel we’ve been building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly.”

While Facebook didn’t give exact details on the amount of money writers could expect from publishing and promoting via the “Instant Articles” platform, the Wall Street Journal reported the percentages in revenue-sharing that could be expected. The publishers who sell advertisements against pieces published to “Instant Articles” gain 100 percent of the money, whereas those publishers who posted to “Instant Articles” where Facebook sells the advertisement get to keep 70 percent of revenue.

Facebook also explained that those who use “Instant Articles” will be able to use the “Facebook Audience Network” to make money off their content as well.

“With Instant Articles, publishers have full control over the look of their stories, as well as data and ads. They have the ability to bring their own direct-sold ads and keep 100% of the revenue, and track data on the ads served through their existing ad measurement systems, or they can monetize their content through the Facebook Audience Network.”

Facebook went on to explain that “Instant Articles” addressed the need to provide folks reading the news via their smartphones a fast way to process that news without slowly loading websites.

In the Facebook for Developers section, Facebook offers more detailed specifications for publishers on how to publish articles to the “Instant Articles” platform, and the type of languages that Facebook expects. With a quick-start guide, an explanation on creating articles, as well as a design guide, the process for creating articles for the “Instant Articles” platform has been spelled out in great detail by the social networking site.

The “Publishing Articles” section details that “Instant Articles” on Facebook will require a headline, a URL, and the full HTML content text of the complete article — even though the article cannot exist in totality only on the Facebook “Instant Articles” site alone.

(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

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