Due to the popularity of TikTok, Facebook is moving away from news material and toward video placements. It appears that publisher relations are losing prominence.
Instant Stories were first introduced in 2015 with the goal of giving publishers a more engaging, quick-loading way to deliver their articles on Facebook and increase reader engagement within the app. Since then, Meta has worked to improve its rapport with publishers and assist them in using Facebook as a supplemental platform to their primary websites by incorporating more referral link and subscription capabilities.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, 50% of all time spent on Facebook is spent watching videos, and Reels are the fastest-growing content type on both Facebook and Instagram.
Since user feeds are displayed based on AI-based recommendations, Meta is striving to push more interesting video material into them.
37,000 Facebook pages are currently using the seven-year-old content format, according to Meta. However, the company said that it is killing off the format because it is underused. A Meta spokesman said:
“Currently less than 3% of what people around the world see in Facebook’s Feed are posts with links to news articles… As we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.”
Publishers will have around six months to adapt to monetising Facebook traffic directly on their own websites before support for Instant Articles ends in mid-April 2023.
