Facebook ties up with Business Standard for Instant Articles subscriptions

The English daily is the first India partner for the product.

Facebook & Business Standard

Last November, Facebook announced that it is developing a paywall for subscriptions publishers to use in Instant Articles with the goal of improving subscriber acquisition from Facebook. To make the subscriptions tools more accessible to a wide range of publishers, the social-networking platform redesigned the implementation approach to cut the development time by 75 per cent, from four-eight weeks to one-two weeks.

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Facebook is also integrating the Instant Articles paywall with third party paywall providers to make it easier for publishers to implement a paywall with Instant Articles on Facebook. For instance, it recently partnered with Piano - a leading paywall provider globally - to give publishers an even simpler way to integrate their paywall with Instant Articles.

Publishers joining the Instant Articles subscriptions test include:

From APAC & India: Business Standard and Malaysiakini

From EMEA: Liberation, Haaretz, Expresso, Informacion.es, il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Messaggero

From LATAM: El Espectador, Estadao, La Nacion (Argentina), La Nacion (Costa Rica), Nexo Jornal, La Prensa

From the US: Advance's Syracuse.com, Business Insider, Gatehouse's Cape Cod Times, Columbus Dispatch, The Florida Times-Union, and Times Herald-Record; McClatchy's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Kansas City Star, and Wichita Eagle; Newsday; Tribune's Chicago Tribune, Fort-Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, Hartford Courant, and Orlando Sentinel

For publishers who want to build a deeper relationship with readers that have not subscribed yet, Facebook is also testing the ability for a publisher to allow a reader to continue reading if they share their email address (commonly referred to as a publisher registration wall).

Increasing focus on retention

Facebook also launched a “Welcome Screen” to encourage new subscribers if they would like to follow the publisher's Page and see more of that publishers' content in News Feed after learning that nearly half of all subscribers did not follow the publishers' Page on Facebook. The welcome screen has increased the percentage of new subscribers who follow the publisher's page from 54 to 94 per cent. This has also increased the articles read by subscribers on Facebook by 40 per cent.