Michael Reckhow, Facebook product manager:

As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook. Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.

They’re launching with nine publishing partners and this specially formatted content is currently only viewable on Facebook for iPhone. Content providers can sell ads in their articles and keep all of the revenue or they can use Facebook’s advertising platform.