Facebook readies Instant Articles for Asia, but Google plans to counter with new open-source alternative
Facebook and Google are joining the content wagon as both companies invest to push more information to users. Facebook is already laying the groundwork to extend its Instant Articles service to Asia, while Google is releasing its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) early next year.
For the past few weeks, Facebook has been advertising job openings through its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore. The company is looking for contractors who can coordinate with “new publishers to begin developing Instant Articles" on top of providing direct support to publishers” using the service. Facebook added it needs Vietnamese or Thai-speaking candidates.
Through Instant Articles, companies can publish content directly on Facebook instead of just putting site links. Facebook claims that the articles can load 10 times faster compared to the standard format on mobile phones. The social network giant introduced the platform around May in the US before extending it to India in the previous week.
“We always planned to launch this program globally, and hope to get to a place where every publisher who wants to participate will have the choice to do so,” The Australian quoted a Facebook spokeswoman.
Countries like Vietnam, Thailand and India have become appealing markets to Facebook because of their increasing access to the Internet. Low-cost smartphones have started to proliferate in these areas, presenting companies the opportunity to reach more users. However, Facebook will have to face a new contender in the arena as Google dabbles on content as well. Its AMP pages can be accessed from Google Search starting early next year, according to the company's official post. AMP is Google's way of coping up with the growth of the mobile Web. An increasing number of people are reading from phones or tables, thus the opportunity, according to Google.
"As an open-source initiative, the AMP Project is open to ad partners across the industry who adopt the spec, and we’re seeing incredible momentum from the ecosystem," explained Google in the announcement.
"Today we’re announcing that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense are working within the framework to improve the advertising experience for users, publishers and advertisers on the mobile Web."
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