After five months since the introduction of Facebook’s faster loading “Instant Articles” to the News Feed, the rollout of the this feature has begun picking up steam.
Today, it was announced by Facebook that thousands of Instant Articles are being published daily. Now, these fast loading articles will now be visible to all users of Facebook’s iPhone app. Users of Android devices are going to have to wait until later this yer, with a public beta, which begins today.
So how will you know if you have run across an Instant Article? You’ll see a lightening bolt in the top right corner of stories in your News Feed.
Instant Articles load ten times faster than normal links on the mobile web, and according to the testing, they are shared more often by Facebook users.
This widely released feature is a great reason for more brands and the like to utilize the social network to drive traffic to their sites. More publishers are scrambling to join the Facebook program now that the feature is now available. The fear of being left behind with slow-loading links seems to be more of a palpable thing these days, now that users could simply move on to a faster publisher.
Publishers appear to be jumping on board. Those who are already using the format includes, The New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Slate, Vox Media, Mic, MTV News, The Washington Post and the Dodo.
In the coming weeks, there will be a big list of partners that will be joining them:
- Billboard
- Billy Penn
- The Blaze
- Bleacher Report
- Breitbart
- Brit + Co
- Business Insider
- Bustle
- CBS News
- CBS Sports
- CNET
- Complex
- Country Living
- Cracked
- The Daily Dot
- E! News
- Elite Daily
- Entertainment Weekly
- Gannett
- Good Housekeeping
- Fox Sports
- Harper’s Bazaar
- Hollywood Life
- Hollywood Reporter
- IJ Review
- Little Things
- Mashable
- Mental Floss
- mindbodygreen
- MLB
- MoviePilot
- NBA
- NY Post
- The Onion
- Opposing Views
- People
- Pop Sugar
- Rare
- Refinery 29
- Rolling Stone
- Seventeen
- Time
- Uproxx
- US Magazine
- USA Today
- Variety
- The Verge
- The Weather Channel