Why Instant Articles Is A 'Very Big Win' For Facebook?

Facebook Inc FB launched its ‘Instant Article’ feature on Wednesday in partnership with leading media publishers like the New York Times Co NYT. This feature will allow users to read whole articles on their timelines instead of moving away from Facebook’s platform.

Mashable Editor-at-Large Lance Ulanoff was on Fox Business recently to elaborate on this new feature.

For Mobile 

“This is really about Facebook mobile experience,” Ulanoff said. “With the mobile app and if you are for example looking at a New York Times link within the mobile app, instead of leaving Facebook you are staying right inside of it with an incredibly rich experience.”

He continued, “Facebook invented something called Snowfall, which were these beautiful designed articles which lived outside on the desktop and elsewhere. Now, you click the link and you are still in Facebook and you are looking at this incredibly good looking content.”

Monetizing And Branding

On the monetizing and branding aspect of Instant Articles, Ulanoff  said, “What Facebok has said is that the media partners will be able to manage their experience, manage their tracking, manage their ad buy, manage their business model in theory.”

“But what I am seeing is right now it’s very interesting because if you look at the New York Times article within this experience, there is no Facebook branding, but there’s also almost no New York Times branding.”

“It’s kind of like the whole idea of monetizing it and branding it is secondary to having this news experience within Facebook. Obviously, in my opinion, this is a very big win for Facebook,” Ulanoff concluded.