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Facebook While Facebook prepares to offer readers a way to  subscribe and pay for news  directly from inside its app, the social network continues to tinker with how it presents publishers’ content elsewhere. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook has removed Instant Articles — Facebook’s self-hosted, faster-loading article format for mobile — from Messenger. “As we continue to refine and improve Instant Articles — and in order to have the greatest impact on people and publishers — we’re focusing our investment in Instant Articles in the Facebook core app and are no longer offering Instant Articles in Messenger,” a spokesperson said. “We believe that Messenger is an exciting channel for new and interesting news consumption experiences, including the opportunity to build unique messaging experiences in Messenger that many publishers (including TechCrunch) have executed successfully via the Messenger Platform.” Instant Article...

Whether to improve relevancy with their content or to keep competitors from advertising on their pages, publishers want control over the types of ads that can run on their sites. Google  announced  Tuesday that it is expanding the capability for publishers to opt out of certain ad categories and has increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. More detailed subcategories give publishers greater refinement in blocking ads on their sites. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories, “Sunglasses,” “Handbags” or “Watches.” The feature is now available in all AdSense markets and supports Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian and Turkish, in addition to English.