Subscriptions in Instant Articles

Subscriptions in Instant Articles offers support and tools on Facebook to publishers with subscription business models, including paywalls in Instant Articles, subscriber experiences and unifying subscription entitlements. Publishers retain full control of the payment and authentication flows, as well as the customer relationship and related data.

An integration of your subscription system with Instant Articles is comprised of five building blocks:

• Configuration: Configure your assets for the paywall and offers
• Content Tiering: Tag your articles to let Facebook know which articles are free, metered, or locked
• Account Linking: Link the account of a new or existing subscriber in your system to a Facebook user
• Pixel Measurement: Measure specific events with the Facebook Pixel across your web articles
• Subscription Syncing: Updating entitlement information for your subscribers in Facebook's database
• Test Your Integration: Test your integration from end to end and learn what to pay attention to

For details on how to build the integration, please refer to the respective documents. For additional information, please refer to how to use Facebook Analytics to measure the performance and how to integrate with third party analytics frameworks.

Overview

If you are operating with a metered approach, Facebook will count the number of times a user has read articles in your metered content tier on Facebook and prevent them from reading more full articles once the limit is reached. A paywall will then be shown, prompting the user to either sign up for a new subscription or sign in to link an existing subscription.

In the case of a freemium model, Facebook will block access to all articles in the locked tier with a paywall giving the same options: sign up for a new subscription or link an existing one.

Both signing up for a new subscription or linking an existing triggers the account linking flow.

After account linking has taken place, the Facebook user will no longer hit a paywall for your metered or locked articles. This will be effective until the subscription expiry time is reached. You can update the expiry time by using the Subscriptions Syncing API.

Getting Started

To get started with Subscriptions in Instant Articles, navigate to the Publishing Tools of your Facebook Page. Under the Instant Articles section you can select the Subscriptions tab.

For the Initial Setup you will need a Facebook App and a Facebook Pixel. They need to be claimed from the same Business Manager as your Page. Enter the details in the Initial Setup section and then submit it for review. Your application will be reviewed, but you can start with the integration right away. After the review and having finished integration you can use the toggle in the Go Live section to make Subscriptions in Instant Articles available to your readers.