Instant Articles roll out on Facebook Messenger

Facebook’s Instant articles were rolled out on Messenger for Android on Thursday, with the iOS version of the application to follow in the coming weeks. Facebook says the articles will load up to 10 times faster than traditional links. It’s also particularly handy for people who are on slow or capped data connections, as Instant Articles reduce the amount of data needed to load a post.

Vice president of messaging products David Marcus announced the launch in a Facebook post: “Over 900 million people share and read news stories privately on Messenger. From now on, this experience will be meaningfully improved as stories will load up to 10 times faster than standard mobile web links, and will be enhanced with dynamic features that make the content more fluid, interactive and immersive.”

Instant Articles will be denoted in Messenger by a lightning bolt icon at the top right corner of links that are shared in the app.

It's unclear how much Instant Articles are doing for publishers — particularly given Facebook's announcement this month that it plans to de-emphasize publishers' posts in the News Feed — but they have proven popular with readers. Now that they're in Messenger, which has more than 900 million monthly users, that popularity should only accelerate.