The title overpromises and under-delivers. FB's mobile app prefetches articles that are published with the 'Instant Articles' feature, a publishing platform similar to Google's AMP. This avoids the page-load pause that would occur by visiting an external link on a third-party host in an external browser.

Of course, this prefetching isn't free -- the user is paying in increased data and battery usage. The content publishers, and the users who do read the content are happy. The most informative portion of the article is a picture showing better conversion rates using 'Instant Articles', but image is directly lifted from Facebook's marketing of the feature.

It's ironic that the article states Instant Articles "may lead to a reduction of spammy 'content marketing' that dominates the Internet, where we see unoriginal listicles churned out with an underlying purpose of making conversions and sales", even though this article is essentially content marketing for the purpose of promoting conversions and sales. But the takeaway for me was I didn't know Facebook has a competitor to AMP.