BBC News and Guardian sign up to Facebook Instant Articles

Facebook has become an increasingly important source of online traffic for news publishers, but the US web giant says that the process of reading articles on mobiles is one of the slowest parts of its app.

Currently, mobile readers have to click on a link in their news feed with a wait of more than eight seconds for the article to load in another web page – a slow experience in the fast-paced internet world.

The new initiative, called Instant Articles, will see stories run within Facebook that the company says will make for a seamless loading experience 10 times faster than the current system.

Facebook has signed up BuzzFeed, the New York Times, National Geographic, NBC News and The Atlantic as US partners with the first five articles from each using Instant Articles launching today (Wednesday).

BBC News, the Guardian, Bild and Spiegel are the first European publishers to sign up to trial the new product, with the first articles due to be published later in the summer.

Source: theguardian.com

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