Instant Articles is a feature from social networking company Facebook
for use with collaborating news and content publishers, that the
publisher can choose to use for articles they select. When a publisher
selects an article for Instant Articles, people browsing Facebook in its
mobile app can see the entire article within Facebook’s app, with
formatting very similar to that on the publisher’s website.

Prior to launch

Facebook initially approached selected publishers with the idea of
Instant Articles, so as to get early feedback that would allow Facebook
to build a product that meets publisher needs.

According to a BuzzFeed spokesperson, BuzzFeed
VP of Product Chris Johansen told Facebook that they needed seven
things in order to participate in the program, including compatibility
with comScore, Google Analytics, and BuzzFeed tracking tools, preservation of key aspects of the look, feel, and functionality of the website, and monetization. In January, Facebook returned for talks, saying they had implemented all of the requests.

Launch (May–June 2015)

Instant Articles launched officially on May 12, 2015. Launch partners included Woven Digital, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, NBC News, The Guardian, BBC News, Bild, and Spiegel Online. Facebook also created an Instant Articles landing page to showcase Instant Articles in reverse chronological order. It was initially available only on Facebook’s iPhone app.

Despite the huge amount of initial media attention paid to Instant
Articles, no Instant Articles were published for three weeks following
May 13, as noted in Business Insider. The Wall Street Journal noted that the pace of publication of Instant Articles was expected to rise significantly in June. On June 9, an Instant Article from The Guardian was published.

Monetization, greater compatibility with other tools, and global rollout (March–April 2016)

In late March 2016, Facebook announced that native ads and video ads would soon be allowed in Instant Articles.
In April 2016, Facebook Instant Articles became usable along with Medium and other publishing tools.
At the 2016 Facebook F8 conference, Facebook announced that Facebook Instant Articles would now be available to all publishers.

Features:

Analytics

At launch time, Facebook announced that Instant Articles would be compatible with comScore, Google Analytics, and Omniture,
as well as many publishers’ internal tracking tools. In addition,
Facebook would offer publishers its own rich analytics on user behavior
on Instant Articles.

Formatting

Facebook promised to preserve the look and feel of articles from the publisher’s website when showing them as Instant Articles, but making them more minimalistic and also better suited to the user’s device.

Advertising

Facebook
allows ads to appear inside Instant Articles Publishers can keep 100%
of the revenue if they sell the ads, and Facebook gets its standard 30%
cut if it sells the ads.
With the launch of Instant Articles, Facebook provided guidelines
regarding the ad formats supported by Instant Articles. One of the
constraints was that no ads can appear above the fold (so that when
somebody first opens an Instant Article, they will not see an ad). This
would help with rapid initial loading of pages.
In late March 2016, Facebook announced an expansion in the
permissible ad formats. In particular, support for native ads as well as
video ads was announced.

Load time

Facebook claimed that Instant Articles load ten times as fast as mobile web content, thereby creating a better user experience.

The Wall Street Journal
reported that, according to tests done by Catchpoint Systems,
Facebook’s claim held true: the average load time for Instant Articles
was between 0 and 300 milliseconds, compared with 3.66 seconds for
similar articles on news publishers’ websites. The difference was
attributed to Facebook pre-loading articles as well as to Facebook
allowing ads to be fetched without disrupting access to the content
itself.

No special treatment in News Feed

Facebook claimed that Instant Articles would not receive ipso facto
special treatment in user’s News Feeds. However, commentators noted
that, due to the faster load times, people might engage more with
Instant Articles, and this might in turn increase their visibility in
users’ feeds, implicitly pressing publishers to start using Instant
Articles.