This just in! TechCrunch has reported that Facebook (NASDAQ:$FB) has removed its Instant Articles feature off of its Messenger platform.
For those who don’t know, Instant Articles is a mobile feature Facebook rolled out in 2015. The purpose? The California-based company wanted the feature to act as a way for news publishers to administer their content to the mass of users using the social networking site. Even though the articles load roughly 10 times faster, there was weak performance which means Facebook’s Instant Articles struggled to grow.
“As we continue to refine and improve Instant Articles — and in order to have the greatest impact on people and publishers — we’re focusing our investment in Instant Articles in the Facebook core app and are no longer offering [the service] in Messenger,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch.
Additionally, the spokesperson mentioned that Messenger would continue to act as a channel for “news consumption experiences,” with thousands of bots that have the ability to answer basic questions or ping users with news updates.
It shouldn’t come as a total surprise that Facebook decided to terminate the feature, as the social media giant has faced monetization issues in the past with Instant Articles. For instance, key publishers including The New York Times have started to distance themselves from the feature due to concerns that they were losing subscription money with very little payoff in regards to audience growth. Back in May, in an effort to save the platform, Facebook added support for Google AMP, and said it would add subscriptions and paywalled content later in 2017.
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