For the most part, a lot of online publications that are free to read rely on advertisements for generating revenue. However with ad blockers becoming more widely used, and with users turning to alternative sources for their information, new ways of generating revenue need to be invented.Subscription services are one of those methods, and it seems that publishers will soon have the option of using Facebook as a subscription service. This was confirmed by Facebook exec Campbell Brown who said, “One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that ‘we want a subscription product — we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,’ and that is something we’re doing now. We are launching a subscription product.”
The inclusion of this feature came about after news publications complained that they had little control over what their stories were being shared on the platform, and how companies such as Facebook and Google were benefiting from the work of newspapers without “fairly” compensating the publishers.
The tests for this new subscription service is expected to kick off this October, but details such as pricing have yet to be revealed, but we suppose we will have the official details in due time.
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