Any medium with a Facebook page can publish Instant Articles from April

Facebook will begin opening its Instant Articles platform to anyone with a Facebook page on April 12. Instant Articles allows media to host articles on Facebook servers to make pages load faster.

With Instant Articles, articles from Facebook should load faster, reducing users’ waiting time to read a clicked link. From April 12, anyone can publish Instant Articles, instead of the few hundred publications that now have access, Facebook writes.

The Instant Articles have a simplified view compared to normal sites to reduce loading time, but publishers can add their own elements such as custom fonts, as well as images, links, and videos. The Instant Articles system is also compatible with measurement tools from other providers, such as comScore, Omniture and Google Analytics.

If the publisher itself places ads within the articles, the publisher keeps all revenue from the ads. If the ads are sold through Facebook’s Audience Network, the company will keep about 30 percent of its revenue from the ads, just as it does today.

Last fall, Instant Articles faced competition from Google AMP, which also aims to reduce loading times by displaying simplified pages.