Facebook may be building paywall in Instant Articles

Facebook may be building a paywall in Instant Articles, its system for fast-loading news articles pages. Publishers are asking for this feature, because all articles on the platform are now accessible to every reader.

Subscribers of a certain medium can see the article on Facebook in Instant Articles, while people without a subscription get a page where they can take out a subscription, that is the wish of publishers, according to tech site The Verge. Google already offers such a feature with amp, Google’s variant of fast-loading web pages that competes with Instant Articles.

Many publishers have already dropped out of Instant Articles, because the system has taken a lot of time and energy and yielded little. In addition, in the News Feed, Facebook did not prioritize Instant Articles over externally hosted articles, leaving media with little benefit from using the system. However, Facebook started to prefer videos and posts from family and friends to those from publishers, causing the reach on Facebook to decline.

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.