Facebook hooks up with publishers for ‘Instant Articles’

Facebook has teamed up with nine news publishers to launch a feature that will allow them to publish articles directly on the network’s mobile news feeds.

Sharing articles on Facebook’s mobile app is more and more common. But as it stands, it takes about eight seconds to load articles. And this is by far the single slowest content type on Facebook, it said.

The new feature called Instant Articles “makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles,” Facebook said in a blog post on its website.

It added publishers can sell advertisements in their articles and keep the revenue, or use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. Publishers will also be able to track data and traffic through comScore and another tools.

The nine partners are The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild, Facebook said.