 Facebook is already the way that millions of people get their news, but they're getting it in a fashion that Facebook considers really slow. It's taking an average of eight seconds between the time you tap on a link inside the Facebook app and the time that the article fully loads on your phone. So they came up with instant articles. It's a way of downloading those articles to your phone at rapid speed, and in so doing, Facebook hopes that you'll start consuming more of those articles than ever before. That means that Facebook will get you to spend more time in the news feed, and maybe the publishers who are publishing their articles to Facebook will start seeing more ad revenue. It's a big idea, and it might actually change the future of media. For a lot of people on the team, articles is just something that they love to read, and we've all experienced that issue of tapping on an article and it takes a super long time to load, and you're sort of like, should I go back or should I wait for it to load? Is it even going to load? And so we wanted to start with solving that problem, but then go beyond that and bring a lot of the stuff that apps have been using to make experiences really great into publishing. Stuff like interactive maps, audio captions, autoplay videos, high resolution photos, the stuff that people expect from apps that you just don't get in mobile publishing because the tools aren't there enough. So starting today inside the Facebook app, some of the articles you'll see there are what Facebook is calling instant articles. As soon as you tap on the link, you'll get all of the content from that publisher in a fraction of a second. Facebook's also built a lot of tools for those publishers so that they can augment their stories with things like audio captions for photos or interactive maps. It's a way of creating a new format just for Facebook. When you go to tap on this, one of the coolest things about instant articles is the article loads instantly. So using a bunch of the stuff that Facebook's built up over the past couple years to make their photos and videos really fast, we've now brought that to articles so when you tap on an article, it loads instantly. Not only that, we've given publishers a bunch of new creative tools to do stuff like autoplay video inline. You can tap on the video and zoom into it and tilt around and see all the detail in this HD video while it's playing. And just by moving your hand, you can sort of change the view of the video. Yeah, you just tilt your phone back and forth and you can look around it like you're there. These are terrifying, by the way. My goodness. And Facebook also did a lot of work to make sure that when you load up an article, it feels like a story from that publisher. So a National Geographic article actually looks like a National Geographic article. It has the logo, it shows you the author, the photographer, it even shows you their Facebook profiles in case you want to follow them and see more of their work. And the sum total is something that feels more like a brand new format for publishing news, more than just a different container for it inside the Facebook app. So you guys built a lot of creative tools for publishers to take advantage of when they're putting together their instant articles. Why take that approach? Why not just sort of create a box of text and let them drop in a couple of pictures? I think the team is just legitimately motivated by making great articles. That's sort of what we approached this project from the beginning as how could we bring lots of the stuff that publishers love to do in print and in traditional desktop websites and give them tools that can more easily be done on a mobile phone? Because that's the place that so many people are reading articles these days, but it's really, really difficult to create really interactive, immersive experiences here. Most publishers today are still thinking in terms of websites, specifically desktop websites. What Facebook wanted them to do was to create a new feed of content that would look really good on mobile. So they created a way for publishers to easily upload everything they're doing straight to Facebook. Facebook parses through that information and serves it up in a format that not only looks good on Facebook, but is probably something that most publishers wouldn't be able to do themselves. So let's just say it, however instant articles play out on Facebook will likely have a big effect on The Verge and on our parent company, Vox Media. We're not a launch partner with instant articles, but maybe we will be down the road. And like any publisher, we'll have to think about exactly what that means and what tradeoffs we're willing to make. In the past, publishers made a thing and then the audience came to that thing. You made a newspaper like this or you made a website. Now with instant articles, publishers are being asked to just become kind of one more stream of content on Facebook, which means that they have to give up some control. Right now they don't have to give up any ad revenue. Down the road, they probably will be asked to give up some of that revenue. So there are a lot of tradeoffs that publishers are going to have to consider. Facebook has a huge audience, but that huge audience comes with some caveats.