According to a new report Facebook is courting some of the biggest news outlets on the planet to convince them to start hosting their content directly on Facebook. This would mean that users wouldn’t have to click through to the news outlet’s website and instead their time on Facebook would increase. In return the social network is reportedly offering these outlets ad revenue generated from visits to the hosted content.
The report comes from The Wall Street Journal which claims that Facebook has talked about this to outlets like The New York Times and National Geographic. This feature will reportedly be called Instant Articles.
It may not matter to people who aren’t particularly concerned about moving away from Facebook when they want to read an article or a news report, but clicking through to another website is troubling for people who are in markets where internet speeds aren’t exactly that fast.
So for users the advantage is that they get the content right on Facebook itself, they don’t have to jump through multiple tabs. Meanwhile Facebook gets to increase the time that its users spend on the world’s largest social network.
Apparently Facebook is going to allow news outlets to keep all of the ad revenue generated from visits to their content. This is limited to associated ads that outlets themselves sell, if the ads are sold by Facebook then it gets to keep 30 percent of the revenue.
The report doesn’t make it clear what sort of control news outlets will have over the experience once they decide to join Facebook’s Instant Articles program, most of them already draw quite a lot of traffic to their websites through their pages on Facebook.
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