Facebook's Instant Articles are kind of a genius move. The feature, first introduced in May, allows articles to load inside of Facebook, and gives incentives to publishers to get them on board. It's ultimate goal, of course, is to increase the time spent inside the Facebook app by giving people less incentive to leave.
There's no word on how successful the feature has been in terms of numbers, but it is now getting the ultimate stamp of approval: a big expansion into Asia.
The company has announced the beta launch of Instant Articles across Asia, in 11 countries, including China, India, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
"As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. Currently, the average news story takes an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook," the company wrote in its blog post.
"Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles."
So far Facebook says that publishers are either now live, or have signed on and will begin publishing soon. This is the complete list, by country:
Instant Article are indicated with a lightning bolt, and they feature interactive features such as zoom, auto-play videos, interactive maps and audio captions. Publishers in Asia are able to sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, or they can choose to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetise unsold inventory.
Asia is an important region for Facebook and it's future growth. The company reached 100 million users in India last year, making it the social network's second largest userbase, behind only the United States.
As for China, while Facebook is not allowed in the country, but as Mark Zuckerberg explained in conference call last month, it's a misconception to say that Facebook is not in China at all right now, since its consumer service is used there.
In fact, he said its one of the biggest advertising markets that Facebook has, because there are a lot of Chinese companies who sell products to people outside of China, and they use Facebook as one of their primary resources for spreading information.
While initially only available on iOS, Facebook launched Instant Articles on Android in India last month. The Android launch will happen later this year.
(Image source: instantarticles.fb.com)
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