After months of speculation, Facebook is finally testing subscriptions for Instant Articles, starting with a version for Android devices. Facebook will roll out testing to a small group of publishers in the U.S. and Europe over the next few weeks, starting with a version for Android. Facebook said it hopes to expand testing to other publishers soon. For now, the subscription option is only being tested via Android, which helps publishers avoid the so-called Apple tax of 30 percent that Apple gets from in-app sales.

The endeavor is part of the Facebook Journalism Project to help Facebook and publishers better understand each other and to collaborate on new products. To date, the following publishers have been involved with the development of the subscription product: Bild, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Hearst’s Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, La Repubblica, Le Parisien, Spiegel, The Telegraph, several Tronc publications including The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Washington Post.

In an October 19 blog post, Campbell Brown, head of news partnerships, Alex Hardiman, head of news product, and Sameera Salari, product manager, explained how subscriptions will work:

• Facebook will support paywalls for metered models and freemium models. With the metered model, Facebook will use a standard 10 articles and test other variations. With the freemium model, publishers will choose which articles are locked.
• When non-subscribers hit a paywall within Instant Articles, they will be prompted to subscribe to gain access to the content.
• If that user subscribes, the transaction will occur on the publisher’s website, and the publisher will handle the payment and keep 100 percent of the revenue.
• The publisher-subscriber relationship will work the same as it does now, leaving full control of access in the hands of the publisher. Publishers will set their own pricing and will own the subscriber data.
• Subscriptions purchased this way will give subscribers full access to a publisher’s site and apps.
• Existing subscribers who hit a paywall within Instant Articles will be prompted to confirm their subscription within Instant Articles to get access to the publisher’s articles.

Along with subscriptions, Facebook said it will test other units to help publishers convert readers into subscribers before they reach the paywall. Facebook said these units will include a Subscribe Call-To-Action Unit (CTA) that will appear in-line within Instant Articles, similar to email sign-up and app install CTAs. Facebook said it will test a ‘Subscribe’ button that will replace the ‘Like’ button in the upper right-hand corner of an article.

‘As with many products we build at Facebook, we’ll observe how people respond to this new experience, and we’ll be working with these partners to analyze, learn, and iterate over time. We hope to expand the test to additional partners in the future,’ Facebook said.

In addition, Facebook said it continues to invest in Instant Articles. According to their data, readers prefer the faster-load times on mobile which can translate to more traffic to and engagement with publishers. Facebook will also continue to improve ad performance within Instant Articles. They said that this year, the average revenue per page view has increased 50 percent and has paid out more than $1 million per day to publishers via Audience Network.

In a related post, Facebook reported that The Atlantic, one of the first nine publishers to use Instant Articles since its summer 2015 launch, has experienced improved monetization and grown traffic via Instant Articles. After two years, The Atlantic has experienced the following:

• Year-over-year increase of more than 40 percent in mobile unique visitors
• Average monthly Facebook Instant Article page views up 66 percent in 2017, compared to the same months in 2016.
• A 27 percent to 33 percent increase in traffic from Instant Articles compared to the publisher’s mobile web version of the same articles
• Audience Network of eCPMs increased 60 percent year-over-year.
• Turning on automatic ad placement led to 15 percent increase in impressions per page.
• Since February, Instant Articles accounts for 20 percent of daily newsletter subscriber growth.

‘Over time, we’ll continue investing in new ways to enable publishers’ subscription businesses – including working with publishers to remove friction from the conversion flow to subscribe, leveraging data to better target content and offers to likely and existing subscribers, and improving our marketing tools to make them better suited for publishers’ needs. We’re looking forward to working with our partners to help support an important business model for the news industry,’ said Facebook.

Insider Take:

I have been skeptical of this venture since Facebook announced it this summer for two reasons. First, Facebook didn’t share a lot of details about how a subscription would work. Second, I had a hard time grasping why the social media giant would work hand-in-hand with news publishers, when they are competing with readers for screen time, attention and revenue.

That said, now that more information has been made available, I love what Facebook is doing with subscriptions that initiate within Instant Articles. Working with large, well-respected publishers and addressing their pain points seems to have yielded a subscription product that could quell publishers’ fears.

In spite of the launch of the subscription product, however, Facebook and publishers are not yet riding off into the sunset together anytime soon. One sticking point for publishers is the testing of a new version of its new feed, one that divides new feeds into two separate feeds. One feed will include posts from friends and family and the other with posts from pages, reports Adweek.