Facebook's Instant Articles now support video ads

From a user's perspective, Facebook Instant Articles are a no-brainer. Just tap the relevant link in your News Feed and the piece is visible immediately. Brilliant. For publishers, however, the feature is a little more complicated. There's a trade-off between performance and control which not all news rooms are comfortable with. To tempt them across, Facebook is introducing video ads to Instant Articles. It's a move to show that the format can be as flexible and, more importantly, as monetizable as the rest of the web. Animated ads and "click to play" videos will be supported immediately, followed by autoplay video ads in the coming weeks.

Publishers can already sell and display ads themselves inside Instant Articles. Doing this will net them 100 percent of the resulting ad revenue. If they give the space to Facebook to sell, however, the social network takes a 30 percent cut. Video ads are, therefore, a move on Facebook's part both to bring publishers on side and also to increase its own advertising business. It could prove to be a valuable revenue stream, especially once the Instant Articles are opened up to all publishers next month.