Facebook plans to introduce 'Facebook News' feature in India by next year

Facebook’s personalised news section under Facebook News was launched for the United States’ users back in June this year. Following a positive response, the company is now extending the feature to Facebook apps in other countries including India. In a company blog, Campbell Brown, VP of Global News Partnerships at Facebook, said, “Helping publishers reach new audiences has been one of our most important goals, and we’ve found over 95 percent of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed”. The blog then elaborated on Facebook’s plans of bringing the feature to the UK, Germany, France, India and Brazil within the next six months to a year’s time. [caption id=“attachment_6621011” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Facebook plans to bring the feature to the UK, Germany, France, India and Brazil within the next six months to a year’s time. Image: Reuters.[/caption] Brown said that news publishers will be paid in every country for the delivery of news on the app. It also mentioned how the experience of Facebook News could be different in every nation as “consumer habits and news inventory vary by country”, stating that they will work closely with news partners in each country to adapt the experience and test ways to deliver a valuable experience for people while honouring the business models by publishers. [caption id=“attachment_8760671” align=“alignnone” width=“600”] Facebook News[/caption] While the social media giant is working on expanding its market, it might come across varying laws regarding the use of news snippets in different countries as well. According to a TechCrunch article, France had become the first European Union nation to ask Google to pay news publishers in Google Search and Google News for the reuse of news articles. Australia also has passed a law recently that makes Facebook and Google pay for articles. The report added that a few other EU countries were also bringing such laws that can force corporate companies to pay publishers for the news items.