Meta to shut 'Instant Articles' format on FB in early 2023

The company once called itself a Fifth Estate and launched revamped News tab that included a dedicated local news section among other topics, including breaking news alerts.

San Francisco: Meta will end support for its 'Instant Articles' format on the Facebook platform next year, as the company moves away from its news-related products and focus on TikTok-like offerings. According to Axios, the quick-loading article format, which was first launched in 2015, will shut down in April 2023. ‘Instant Articles' was a mobile format to load news articles on the Facebook app quickly.

Once the support is ended, news links on Facebook will take a user to a publisher's mobile site. "Currently less than 3 per cent of what people around the world see in Facebook's Feed posts with links to news articles," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences," it added.

The company is now giving news publishers six months to readjust their Facebook strategies. The company once called itself a Fifth Estate and launched revamped News tab that included a dedicated local news section among other topics, including breaking news alerts. Earlier this month, Meta announced to shut down its newsletter product, Bulletin, for creators and writers by early 2023.

Meta said it would refocus resources from Bulletin to work on its discovery algorithm, which the company is building to take on the Chinese short-form video TikTok. In June 2021, the company launched Bulletin, a set of publishing and subscription tools to support creators in the US. (IANS)