Alibaba's UC News says growing rapidly in India, Indonesia

Alibaba Group firm UCWeb on Tuesday said it is growing rapidly in India and Indonesia with its new product UC News getting 100 million article views daily.

"With 100 million daily article views, UC News has rapidly grown in India and Indonesia market since its launch in June 2016. UCWeb is augmenting its focus on digital content aggregation and distribution in the world's second largest internet market, India," UCWeb said in a statement.

In February, the company claimed to have 80 million monthly active users. "With over 100 million MAUs, UCWeb envisions itself as powerful as Google and Facebook and aims to bring the global mobile internet to an era of 'GUF' (Google, UCWeb and Facebook)," Alibaba Mobile Business Group's President-Overseas Business Jack Huang said.

He said the company is experiencing a fast rise in the average time spent on UC News and as of ongoing quarter, an average user spends over 23 minutes on UC News.

"Users are embracing diverse digital content and their appetite for such content is being met by UC News. Going forward, we are also targeting more diversified and localised content on our platform by end of 2017 to make the local content ecosystem stronger," Huang said.

UCWeb has plans to invest Rs 200 crore for driving content distribution in India over the next 2 years. UC News recently announced a reward plan for self-publishers, bloggers and independent writers with an initial investment of Rs 5 crore.