Facebook’s instant articles are a great way to get you articles across to a larger audience. However, what they aren’t equally great for, is monetization. There are a lot less ads on these Instant articles than you would find on a normal one and a such, publishers are kept from a fair bit of their revenue. To solve this issue, Facebook is now increasing the number of ads available with Instant articles.
A few months ago, Facebook started with tests that placed ad units near the bottom of Instant Article pages – basically where the related articles were present until now. The company is now opening up these tests to everyone. Under this scheme of things, a native ad unit is placed in Instant articles and it shows readers ads from Facebook’s advertiser network.
The company has been testing this out for a fair amount of time and sad that there was reason to suggest a rapid increase in revenue as a direct result. The company is now rolling the feature out to a wider set of publishers. Not only it hopes that the publishers will be able to make more money, but Facebook also hopes to be able to further improve its own abilities with regards to advertisements in general.
Instant Articles, AMP and other such technologies place Facebook, Google and other parent companies in a sort of a fix. These technologies are propagated because they produce (or attempt to produce) the bare content to the reader without all the assorted riff-raff that is piled on by publishers in a usual article. However, the same riff-raff also includes advertisement that makes the exercise of producing articles worthwhile.
A fine balance is needed and that is exactly what, Facebook has been trying to come up with. The company has been experimenting to come upon that balance. Last month for instance, Facebook launched an SDK that would let users create articles for Google AMP and Apple News from where they created articles for its Instant Articles as well.
