Meta will end support for its Instant Articles format in the Facebook app next year, axios reports. The fast-loading article format was first launched in 2015, but Meta is deviating from it as part of a wider withdrawal of news-focused products. The company has informed its media partners that Facebook will no longer support Instant Articles in six months (or April 2023), according to Meta spokesperson Erin Miller. After support ends, news links on Facebook direct a user to a publisher’s mobile site.
“Currently, less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook’s feed are posts with links to news articles,” Miller said in a statement. “And as we said earlier this year, there’s no point as a company to over-invest in areas that don’t match user preferences.” Meta is instead trying to make Facebook’s feed feature more like TikTok’s, with the main feed focusing on algorithmic recommendations of content you might like.
Meta isn’t the only company making big changes with its fast-loading article format; Google no longer requires articles to be built in AMP to appear in the “Top Stories” section and instead focuses more on the “page experience” to rank search results.