Are you looking to start social media investing? If so, today’s announcement might help to aid your decision. On Wednesday, social media behemoth Facebook (NASDAQ:$FB) announced that it will be rolling out a new update to its News Feed. With the update, Facebook promises to speed up loading times for users clicking on articles from secondary websites.
The Menlo Park, California-based company will now give precedence to websites that load faster. Additionally, the company will also downgrade slower-loading websites. Users can expect this change to be pushed out over the next couple months, which means publishers will be able to use the opportunity – and the time – to improve their site speeds before they face a downgrade from the company.
As TechCrunch said, Facebook’s proposed solution to slow loading times – Instant Articles – is not mentioned in the company’s August 2nd announcement:
“Oddly, Facebook’s blog post makes no mention of Instant Articles, despite the obvious connection here between Facebook’s own speedier mobile web format and its desire to increase distribution of links pointing to faster websites.”
TechCrunch added, “The Instant Article format was designed to make reading news stories via Facebook a better experience for mobile users. It does this by stripping out extraneous code that can bog mobile web pages down, while also placing restrictions on the number of ads they can display, among other things.”
What’s the reason for Instant Articles not being included in the new plan?
Well, some speculate it’s because publishers simply don’t like it. The Instant Articles feature has faced a tremendous amount of criticism from content creators as they believe it limits their capability to monetize their articles.
As of right now, Facebook says the site speed algorithm change has nothing to do with the Instant Article feature.
On Wednesday afternoon, shares of Facebook were trading at $168.60 per share, which is down $1.26. So far this year, Facebook has gained 46.54%.
Featured Image: twitter
