Top publishers to post news stories directly to Facebook timelines

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has today announced that it is launching a news feature called Instant Articles, which posts news items directly to a user’s timeline. Instant Articles differs from the current news feature in that users will no longer have to click through a headline link to access the publishers’ stories. Now articles will appear within a timeline feed, with the papers still collecting from ad space in the featured articles or through Facebook’s own ad service. The feature will launch shortly on Facebook for iPhone, before appearing across other apps and online. The news service is expected to roll out articles from the BBC, BuzzFeed, NBC, The New York Times and National Geographic among other leading publishers. Although Facebook has not given much detail regarding the new scheme, it is thought that they news sources will be paid through a revenue sharing scheme in relation to how popular their pieces are. Currently news items featured on Facebook take an average of eight seconds to load on a new site and are the “slowest single content type on Facebook.” Instant Articles hopes to load ten times faster with stories pre-loading while users scroll through their newsfeeds.