Facebook will soon be showing more ads more frequently in Instant Articles

By Lulu Chang March 10, 2017

Facebook Instant Articles

They’ve had a rocky relationship, to be sure, full of ups and downs and accusations and codependence, but it looks like publishers and Facebook may soon be on their way to a slightly more mutually beneficial situation. In a blog post this week, Facebook announced an “update to monetization in Instant Articles,” allowing publishers greater customization options when it comes to inserting ads within individual articles.

“We’re making improvements to our Automatic Ads Placement feature and introducing flexibility so that ads can be placed more frequently in articles, now up to every 250 words,” Facebook product manager Harshit Agarwal wrote on Thursday. This ups the frequency from the previous limit of every 350 words.

Related Videos

This, Facebook hopes, will appease media companies that rely upon ads (much as Facebook does) as a major revenue stream. Should publishers choose to manually select and place video or static ads, they’ll be allowed to keep 100 percent of the money. Should they opt for Facebook’s automatic ad placement option, they’ll get 70 percent instead.

“As part of the Facebook Journalism Project we’ve been in ongoing conversations with the news industry to better serve the needs of publishers and people engaged in news on Facebook,” Agarwal noted. “We’ve heard from publishers that having more flexibility and control over their business strategies on our platform is important.”

Of course, Instant Articles has long been a sore spot for publishers, as it prevents readers from seeing native ads and other articles, or generally browsing the publisher’s site, keeping them instead on Facebook. Hopefully, these latest updates will serve as something of a compromise between the world’s primary traffic referrer and the news sources of the world.

Concluded Agarwal, “Looking ahead, we’re working with our partners to explore additional ad placements and formats within Instant Articles that drive revenue for publishers and performance for advertisers while maintaining a great reading experience.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Social Media

Instagram to soon let creators make NFTs and sell them to fans

Series of four mobile screenshots showing the selling of collectibles on Instagram.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on your favorite social media platforms are apparently here to stay. At least that seems to be the case for one Meta-owned platform.

On Wednesday, as part of its Creator Week event, Meta announced that Instagram will soon let creators make and sell their own NFTs on the app itself. The new ability was described as another way for fans to support their favorite creators.

Social Media

Twitter’s edit button could soon be free for all users

Ever since Elon Musk closed the deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion last week, events have been moving fast at the social media company.

Musk and his inner circle, along with a number of senior executives who still have their jobs, reportedly spent the weekend trying to work out where exactly to take the platform and its global community of around 230 million people.

Social Media

Twitter Blue is losing Ad Free Articles and Musk’s latest tweets indicate further changes

Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

Twitter has reportedly ended its ad-free articles perk that it offered to Twitter Blue subscribers.

On Tuesday, 9to5Mac reported that Twitter has terminated a Twitter Blue feature known as "Ad-Free Articles." The feature allowed Twitter Blue subscribers to read articles without ads from participating publishers. The cancellation of Ad-Free Articles was apparently announced via an email sent to those publishers.