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Reuters leverages Instant Articles to support commercial and audience growth

September 8, 2021

Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world, employing 2,500 journalists in 200 locations globally. With nearly 6M followers, Reuters’ Facebook page is one of its most effective audience growth drivers, when it comes to average traffic and engagement per piece of content.
Following consistent growth in traffic, Reuters wanted to boost pageviews, monetization, organic audience, and overall content reach on its Facebook page, so the team decided to leverage Instant Articles – the native format which enables faster loading, increased newsfeed relevance and a seamless reading experience on mobile.
“Reuters is valued as a highly premium multimedia news provider and destination for professionals,” Pierpaolo Maniglio, Director of Strategic Growth, Reuters, said. “A significant portion of our most successful content on Facebook relates to pure hard and breaking news. We wanted to understand whether transitioning referral traffic from mobile web to Instant Articles would have an incremental commercial benefit on our breaking news coverage.”
Reuters’ overall content reach on Facebook has consistently grown following its launch of Instant Articles, boosting its circulation on Facebook and creating incremental revenue growth.
“Results were genuinely higher than our initial expectations,” Pierpaolo Maniglio said. “We rolled out Facebook Instant Articles in late August 2020 with a phased approach, but were able to scale quickly across all of our English top news and international content because of the early positive signals.”
Strategy
Before launching Instant Articles, the Reuters team made sure they understood their audiences’ reading and media consumption behaviors on Facebook, as well as readers’ relationship with the nature of their content.
Using Creator Studio, they tweaked and refined their strategy. By leveraging data insights and monitoring article performance, the Reuters team could work out how they could best boost content circulation and monetization.
They quickly scaled. With a growth hacking mindset and an on-the-go approach to learning, the team soon realized they had an opportunity: Instant Articles’ high click-through rate was creating a positive effect on desktop and mobile web versions of the same stories.
“It was ultimately making the pie bigger across the board,” Pierpaolo said. “You can build your initial business case based on the most educated assumptions. However, it’s only by testing in the real world that you’re provided with the insights needed to assess and readjust your strategy.”
Impact
Reuters’ revenues were not only better than the team had originally modeled, but they also yielded greater numbers than they had previously achieved through open market programmatic ads.
“The growth in audience and overall Facebook reach per single post meant it was possible for us not to sacrifice noticeable traffic,” explained Pierpaolo. “A better page health and newsfeed score positively affected all content circulation – as well as outside the Facebook App, across desktop and mobile web.”
Results
  • “Results were over 2.5X higher than our initial expectations, reaching the internal 12-month circulation goal we set up in less than 90 days”
  • “Comparing the average reach of similar link posts, we observed that in H1 2021 the Articles Opened KPI is 120% higher versus previous period”.
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The Meta Journalism Project works with publishers around the world to strengthen the connection between journalists and the communities they serve. It also helps address the news industry's core business challenges, through trainings, programs and partnerships.