Facebook Has Got A New Plan For Its News Feed: Report

Facebook is reportedly in talks with news media houses to establish partnerships for the rights to publish their content on its site.

According to a Wall Street Journal report the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is offering publishers “millions of dollars” for such agreements.

The Journal reported on Thursday (August 8) that Facebook representatives had told news executives that they’d pay as much as $3 Mn a year to license stories, headlines and other material.

Facebook has reportedly declined to comment but confirmed that the company is working on launching a “news tab” for its service this fall. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began talking about a news section on the service in April. The company has faced criticism that it has been spreading false and misleading news on its platform.

The social media platform has been plagued with criticism of ads overtaking relevant content on users’ feeds. Facebook’s plans to keep a separate news section would give publishers control over how articles appear on Facebook and whether readers would receive only snippets, like a headline and some text, before being sent to the publisher’s website.

Facebook’s Changing Strategy For News

Facebook has been trying out new ways to promote its news feed. The company has experimented with promoting more local content last year. Before this the company had discontinued a beta launch of an “Explore” section.

In this, Facebook was placing posts from official pages in a separate feed, while limiting the main News Feed to posts from friends and family. But the experiment, which was being tested in 6 countries, did not achieve the desired result, the company said at the time.

“People don’t want two separate feeds,” said Facebook’s Adam Mosseri, who runs the News Feed, in a blog post. “In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”