MUMBAI: American social media giant Facebook has tied up with Business Standard as part of its subscription programme. Facebook on Friday announced that it had added a total of 28 such partners globally, Business Standard being the only one from India.

In November 2017, the Mark Zuckerberg-founded company had stated it was developing a paywall for subscription publishers to use in ‘Instant Articles’ with the goal of improving subscriber acquisition from the social media site. This newspaper is Facebook’s first India partner for the product.

Around the world, Facebook has partnered publications including Bild, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Hearst (The Houston Chronicle and The San Francisco Chronicle), La Repubblica, Le Parisien, Spiegel, The Telegraph, Tronc (The Baltimore Sun, The Los Angeles Times, and The San Diego Union-Tribune), and The Washington Post.

“We have seen consistent, positive performance of paywall ever since our earliest results were announced in June and today we're announcing several updates to our subscription tools, and the addition of 28 publishers to the test,’’ Facebook said in a blog. To make the subscriptions tools more accessible to a wide range of publishers, the company has redesigned the implementation approach to cut the development time by 75 per cent to a maximum of two weeks, it said. Also, the social media major is testing the ability of a publisher to allow a reader to continue reading if he shares his email address.