Facebook and Apple agree to take out a subscription via Instant Articles

Facebook and Apple have reached an agreement to subscribe to Instant Articles publications on the social network. As a result, the feature should also be available on iOS in March.

Recode writes that the companies have disclosed little about the details of their agreements and that Facebook only said the number of free-to-read articles would be reduced to five. The problem was that Apple wanted a 30 percent share of the proceeds. The money won’t go to Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg explained when the feature was introduced in August of last year. This was initially only available for Android due to the disagreement between Apple and Facebook.

iOS users can use the feature to take out subscriptions from Instant Articles, the fast-loading articles that publishers have been able to put on Facebook for several years. According to Recode, there are two versions of the paywall that publishers can apply. For example, users can read up to ten articles for free and it is possible to immediately redirect them to the publisher’s page to take out a subscription the moment they want to read a certain article.

Facebook presented Instant Articles a few years ago. In addition, Facebook hosts the articles and due to restrictions on the pages, they have to load quickly on mobile devices, while publishers of their own advertisements are allowed to keep all the revenue and 70 percent of the revenue from advertisements sold via Facebook.