Instant Arti­cles are still in their infan­cy, and full details of the impli­ca­tions and impact for all par­ties involved – par­tic­u­lar­ly adver­tis­ers – are still to be seen. As more pub­lish­ers roll­out con­tent via this for­mat, eyes will be on how con­sumers inter­act and brands respond to the pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Last month, Face­book rolled out Instant Arti­cles to a clam­or of opin­ions – rang­ing from a boon to mar­keters and pub­lish­ers to the poten­tial end of media as we know it.

As a reminder: Face­book Instant Arti­cles are fast-load­ing, rich-media sto­ries host­ed and accessed direct­ly from the Face­book Mobile News­feed.

Instant Arti­cle launched with 9 pub­lish­er part­ners, and sev­er­al weeks lat­er, the main thought on the minds of most was: so where exact­ly are these arti­cles?

Face­book indi­cat­ed the roll­out of Instant Arti­cles would be a grad­ual process, and now, near­ly a month after the announce­ment, The New York Times said it would have a “full feed of about 30 Times sto­ries a day” live lat­er in June.

This comes hot off the heels of Apple’s launch of its own mobile news­read­er, News, at its World­wide Devel­op­er Con­fer­ence – with an impres­sive ros­ter of pub­lish­ers, includ­ing the New York Times and oth­ers.

In the case of both Apple News and Face­book Instant Arti­cles, pub­lish­ers will be able to retain 100 per­cent of the ad rev­enue they fill them­selves and 70 per­cent of rev­enue for inven­to­ry the plat­form sells. This mon­e­ti­za­tion is like­ly a major sell­ing point for pub­lish­ers.

For mar­keters look­ing at this ad oppor­tu­ni­ty, Instant Arti­cles offer some key poten­tial ben­e­fits:

• Trust­ed and Native Ad Envi­ron­ment: Ads with­in Instant Arti­cles offer an inte­grat­ed and engag­ing way to reach con­sumers across of a set of pre­mi­um pub­lish­ers.
• Con­nec­tion to Mobile Con­sumers: The high­ly respon­sive, mobile design of Instant Arti­cles caters to today’s mobile-first audi­ence with con­tent that is said to load 10x faster than stan­dard linked arti­cles.
• New, com­ple­men­tary reach: For pub­lish­ers who decide to fill their ad inven­to­ry via the Face­book Audi­ence Net­work, this could mean a seam­less entry point for brands already engaged in this chan­nel to test a new for­mat and gar­ner new reach.

Ear­ly num­bers reveal Instant Arti­cles are grab­bing high­er engage­ment rates – an aver­age of 4.3x more than link posts. If this is an indi­ca­tion of audi­ence engage­ment once in the arti­cle, it could bode well for adver­tis­ers. But don’t let the num­ber deceive you, this was a small sam­ple of ini­tial posts.

There are a few things brands that are inter­est­ed in explor­ing this oppor­tu­ni­ty should keep in mind. For exam­ple, some ini­tial Instant Arti­cle ad guide­lines have already been announced such as:

• There will be a max­i­mum of four ads per arti­cle.
• No ads will be placed “above the fold.”

Giv­en the selec­tive group of roll­out part­ners, it doesn’t appear that Instant Arti­cle ads slots will pro­vide scale ini­tial­ly, but as this ini­tia­tive ramps and more part­ners come on board, there could increased spots with increased com­pe­ti­tion. Anoth­er real­is­tic bet could have brands work­ing with pub­lish­ers to fea­ture spon­sored con­tent sto­ries with­in Instant Arti­cles for a true native adver­tis­ing expe­ri­ence.

The final point of con­sid­er­a­tion is the vis­i­bil­i­ty of Instant Arti­cles with­in the News­feed. A brand’s con­tent can be at the mer­cy of EdgeR­ank as Face­book has tak­en mea­sures to adjust it algo­rithm based on its users activ­i­ties and pref­er­ences.

Face­book has said Instant Arti­cles won’t be favored by the algo­rithm, but will that change if users grav­i­tate toward them? The lat­est EdgeR­ank update is tak­ing into account time spent on sto­ries, so if audi­ences are high­ly engaged with this for­mat, will that boost their occur­rences and vis­i­bil­i­ty with­in the News­feed?

Are you plan­ning to explore Face­book Instant Arti­cles?