Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Facebook's plan to host full news articles could start tomorrow

BE8FFJ Digitally altered front page of Facebook social networking web site. Facebook; Facebook; website; web; site; display; fro

Facebook wants to do for news content what it's done with native video, and the first bit of self-hosted editorial content ("Instant Articles") could go live tomorrow. It's starting with The New York Times and will include Buzzfeed, NBC News and National Geographic if unnamed sources speaking to New York Magazine are to be believed. Apparently NYT's business side is why a deal that surfaced in late March is only coming to fruition now, with CEO Mark Thompson's push for "the most favorable" terms causing delays.

A Wall Street Journal report says The Social Network is offering to let publishers keep 100 percent of the money from ads they sell against an article, or 70 percent if Facebook sells the ad. That bit is incredibly important because without traffic going to, say, nytimes.com, and staying on Facebook instead, a publication could lose its ability to pay the bills and its employees. The big argument seems to be that NYT is working to insulate its million-plus digital subscribers from free content hosted on Zuckerberg's baby, thus rendering a subscription kind of pointless. Regardless of if this is happening tomorrow or not, we won't have to wait too long before we find out.

[Image credit: Alamy]

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Via: Poynter

Source: New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal

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