(2015-05-13) Facebook Instant Articles

FaceBook is launching its Instant Articles model, where a select number of Journalism sources (incl. Ny Times and BuzzFeed) get their content published natively inside FaceBook.

In particular, it sounds like some amount of content gets background-downloaded into the IOS app. People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of EightSeconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles. There's no link/source for those numbers.

• Everyone quotes that EightSeconds number, but it's never clear to me exactly what that represents... source?

  • Jul'2014: Here are some additional takeaways from Yottaa's preliminary data analysis on mobile usage for the top 500 e-retailers: Time to render was more than 8 seconds longer for sites with four redirects compared to those with none.

  • Mar23'2015: Trilibis found that only 26 per cent (of 100 business, technology and entertainment news websites that employ responsive design) load in less than four seconds on a mobile device, and 27 per cent take more than eight seconds to load... Trilibis’s tests found that image size was the primary cause of sluggish performance.

  • Mar24'2015: FaceBook announces it may start hosting news sites' content, and many articles un-quote FaceBook like Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. I haven't found a single case with (a) a specific-person quote, or (b) a link to a page with more detail.