Meta has decided to end support for Instant Articles by mid-April 2023, as confirmed by Engadget.
The feature was introduced to Facebook in 2015 to help quickly load news articles on mobile devices.
This means the end of an era that began with hopes for the masses and money for professional journalism, and ended after many criticisms.
Meta focuses on video, not press articles
The company may restructure and direct more resources into its core products, including video-focused features like Rails.
A Meta spokesperson told Engadget: "Currently less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in Facebook's timeline are posts that contain links to news articles."
"As we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences."
The company pointed out that its users spend more time watching videos, especially short ones, and want to see less news and political content on Facebook.
The company also said last week that it will shut down the newsletter platform in early 2023.
By April the service will end, giving publishers six months to re-evaluate their strategies on Facebook.
Then, when a reader clicks on a link to a news article on Facebook's mobile app, they'll be taken to the publishers' site.
According to Meta, the mobile web experience has improved extensively due to faster internet speeds and more powerful hardware, so in her opinion the Instant Articles service is unnecessary for many people who access text news.
Meta" and the press... a tricky relationship
Meta, “Facebook” previously, with the press is not comfortable, especially when it decided to change the content viewing algorithm, preferring that Facebook users view the posts of their owners and families at the expense of media pages.
This decision led to a catastrophic worldwide collapse in visits to news pages and press sites, causing a significant decrease in revenue for the media.
Even when Facebook gave the ability to read articles directly in the Facebook platform, the feature restricted ads and subscriptions, leading many publishers to abandon it.
In the summer of 2020, the social network launched its news service Facebook News, the section dedicated to journalistic and media content on the blue site, to everyone in the United States.
But Axios noted that Meta has reduced its investment in news content, such as ending payments to US publishers to include their articles in the News section.