Facebook Inc. has brought its Instant Articles feature to Android smartphones in India, with five publisher partners to begin with.
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“We’re excited to be working with The Indian Express to bring their great and proven journalism to people in India with Instant Articles”.
The publishing partners for Instant Articles will make dedicated and feature-rich content that will be hosted by Facebook and will load within the app. As the won’t have to leave the app, the content loads faster.
According to a report in The Live Mint, Facebook, through a cross-section of publishers, will monitor the consumption of different types of content in the Indian market.
As a reminder, Instant Articles launched in the US on iPhone with the following nine publications: The Atlantic, BBC News, Bild, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, National Geographic, NBC, The NY Times, and Spiegel.
Facebook started rolling out Instant Articles earlier this year, and said that it will enable users to read their stories up to 10 times faster. Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, or they can choose to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetize unsold inventory. Incidentally, autoplay videos are easy to build on Android, which is another reason the company prefers Android. And like many, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is very bullish on India. With 130 million users, it is the second largest user base for Facebook after the US. It was a huge hit: in 2 we… After the tests, it will roll out to more publishers in the coming months to scale up. Article content is relatively less heavy than other content, but issues of load time and connectivity in a market like India (and other emerging markets) provide a company like Facebook a huge opportunity to make this content more easily accessible.
It’s not all been smooth sailing for Instant Articles, though.
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We’ve reached out to Facebook for further comment on the India launch. The users will be able to do this through the Instant Articles feature on their Facebook App.
