Thursday, May 17, 2018

[Solution] How to solve the 'minimal readership' issue?


Due to recent Facebook policy updates, lots of publishers faced a similar problem.
It was looking like this:


The provided URL is not being accepted because the site has minimal readership, which violates the Instant Article Policies (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/policy/). Please provide a different URL.
It was appearing when a person tried to connect url of a website to a particular page for sending Instant Articles to review.
Yes, as many guys working with Instant Articles say, it is a bit tough today to get your Instant Articles approved.

But still, it's possible. And here is how.

The Facebook 'minimal readership' issue may be solved quite easily. You just need to... get the traffic from Facebook, yes. That's how they want publishers to have enough readers.

So, you just need to have some amount of traffic from Facebook for like a few days. Due to my observations, it's 4-5 days. The total amount of traffic (based on my experience) ~5000 views is enough.
These numbers come from my personal experience, but some guys in closed Facebook Instant Articles groups tell about 10k, 20k or even 30k required. Probably it depends on the methods you drive this traffic, or the methods to measure it. I used Google Analytics and it showed about 5k pageviews at the moment when 'minimal readership' issue stopped popping in my Instant Articles account.

The mentioned amount of users can be achieved in two ways:
- organic traffic (posting links with a new domain to your pages or public groups)
- paid traffic (send traffic directly to your post).

Do it continuously within 5-7 days and your minimal readership problem will be solved.
But don't forget the Facebook review process itself. If you stop sending traffic to your domain for just a few days, you may receive the message: "The provided URL is not being accepted because the site has minimal readership, which violates the Instant Article Policies" again.

So make sure that you are able to send traffic again and again until getting approved by Facebook Instatnt Articles.


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