Facebook is set to publish news articles from sites like New York Times directly to users' Facebook feeds to encourage them to stay on the social networking site.
Facebook users might start seeing full National Geographic, Buzzfeed and New York Times articles and videos directly in their social network accounts later this month.
It's called "Instant Articles" and it's something that should've happened long time ago, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Over the past few months, the social networking giant has been criticized for its moves against content publishers. However, judging by its latest move, it seems as though Facebook is keeping publishers in mind after all.
Facebook has hinted for quite some time that it wants its myriad of users to be able to read news articles without leaving the social networking site, and Instant Articles is the product of those plans, The Verge noted.
Numerous publishers post links to their content on Facebook and this has become an important source of online traffic for news sites. Opening those links on a mobile device however can be really slow and frustrating as it takes around eight seconds.
Instant Articles plans to speed up that process, according to people familiar with the matter.
The proposal has attracted mixed reactions from publishers. While it attracted interest from some publishers, many other are thinking twice about partnering up more tightly with the social network giant.
On average big web publishers get about 60 percent of their traffic through referrals from Facebook.
In a survey by the Pew Research Center last year, 48 percent of respondents said they read news about government and politics on Facebook in the past week, about as many as got news about these topics from local television.
In order to woo publishers, the social networking website is offering to change its traditional revenue-sharing model.
In one of the models under consideration, publishers would keep all the revenue from ads they sell on Facebook-hosted news sites, according to reports. If Facebook sells the advertisement, it would keep around 30 percent of the revenue just like it does in many other cases.
That said, Facebook has another motivation to give up some revenue as it hopes the faster-loading content will motivate users to spend more time on its network.
Whether publishers will be able to place or measure the ads they sell within Facebook and what format the ads might take is still unclear. It seems the social network want publishers to use its own advertising technology products, including LiveRail and Atlas rather than those offered by rivals such as Google Inc.
Some publishers, however, have additional concerns. Specifically, publishers want to retain control over the user experience, and access to data on their readers. An executive of one publisher that has had discussion with Facebook stated, "It's not just about the bottom line," the executive added, "Publishers will still want to defend other aspects of the business."
The people close to the situation revealed that the deals with Facebook's launch partners are still being finalized and there is a possibility that the time could change. In addition, Facebook is in active talks with other publishers too.
