Facebook announced today that it is ready to host news content from online publications with a little help from a tool called Instant Articles.
This feature will allow publishers to promote their content to the News Feed of members of the social network. What is different about the new feature is that Facebook users will not have to leave their News Feed page to read an article that interests them.
Facebook also revealed that it has signed deals with some of the biggest publishers including: New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed and NBC.
The company revealed that it is currently waiting for more news agencies to join the program, so that they can offer users a greater variety of news to choose from.
In a blog post, Facebook Product Manager Michael Reckhow assured news publishers that they shouldn't face any financial losses if they choose to use the Instant Articles.
They are given the option to either sell the ads contained in their articles and keep all the revenue or use Facebook's Shared Network, which means they will have to share the profits with the social networking site, and that they will receive 70% of the total amount.
Facebook also says that mobile users will be able to access news ten times faster than before, since they won't have to wait for the external page to load.
The feature is currently only available for the iOS platform, but we will soon see it on Android.
