Facebook expands monetization options on Instant Articles

A few months ago, as part of the Facebook Journalism Project, the company began testing ad units in the related articles section at the bottom of Instant Articles. The company has announced that they are opening the test to all publishers, beginning Instant Articles Monetization.

Encouraged by the incremental increase that publishers have seen in average revenue per 1,000 page views (RPM) on Instant Articles since the test began, Facebook is looking for feedback from a wider set of publishers.. Publishers interested in implementing these ad units can find the technical details under Facebook’s developer documentation.

After receiving feedback from publishers that ads in related articles are an important monetization driver on the mobile web. This test from Facebook introduces a similarly placed native ad unit in Instant Articles that shows readers relevant and high quality ads from Facebook advertisers.

Facebook’s goal with ads in Instant Articles is to maintain the best reading experience for people, while driving revenue for publishers and performance for advertisers. Instant Articles provide a better, faster reading experience for people on Facebook, which the company has seen drive a significant boost of traffic for publishers. In aggregate, Instant Articles delivers between 20 - 50% more traffic, compared to mobile web content.

On top of this boost in traffic, the social network is investing heavily in new features to help publishers build deeper relationships with their audience through call-to-action units and increase ads monetization, with recent enhancements like adding flexibility in ad placements and enabling new types of Facebook ads. Those efforts are paying off. Instant Articles now pays out more than $1 million per day to publishers via Facebook Audience Network. In the last 6 months alone, RPM, or revenue per 1,000 page views, that publishers see from Facebook Audience Network in Instant Articles has increased by over 50%.

Publishers have responded to these improvements in traffic and monetization and Facebook now has over 10,000 publishers around the world using Instant Articles, growing over 25% in the last six months alone. More than a third of all clicks to articles on Facebook are now to Instant Articles.

Facebook has felt optimistically encouraged by this progress, and is continuing to invest to address a variety of publishers’ business models and look forward to collaborating with our partners to explore areas for further development.

While they continue monitoring the impact of ad units in the recirculation section, there are other features publishers should leverage to generate as much value as possible from Instant Articles. Check to see if the following tools are already implemented in your articles:

1. Use our Automatic Ads Placement feature to optimize the number and placements of ads on each page.
2. Bring your direct sold campaigns to Instant Articles using your existing ad technology and flexible ad sizes.
3. Build Call-to-Action Units with our self-serve tools to drive newsletter sign-ups and Page likes.

Instant Articles Monetization  opens up an all news audience to publishers.