Over the years Facebook has grown from a humble online social networking platform to one of the biggest technological companies in the world. The world’s famous social media platform boasts of a whopping 2.6 billion users. Facebook also owns the text messaging app Whatsapp and the picture sharing platform Instagram.
Since Facebook has a huge database of users, news publications and creators have been asking the tech giant to pay them for their content on social media. In what can be called as the first step towards meeting these demands, Facebook announced it would be expanding its dedicated news tab section to other countries including India, the UK, Germany, France and Brazil.
Facebook News is a separate section on the world’s most popular social platform which will help users find and read news articles from participating news publications. Facebook rolled out the new section in the United States of America (USA) in June 2020. The launch won’t happen immediately, Facebook said in a blog post. Instead, the expansion would happen within the next six months to a year.
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Facebook also said it has 200 publications lined up for the news tab and it includes some of the big names like Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Bloomberg and ABC News. The social media giant will reportedly pay some publishers $1 million to $3 million a year to feature their stories, according to Bloomberg. At the moment, Facebook has not disclosed the names of local Indian publications that are willing to partner with the social media company on this initiative.
Facebook news is different from the instant articles feature which is currently available on the platform. However, in the case of Facebook News, whenever a user opens a news article it will take the reader directly to publishers’ sites. Facebook users can read the entire story for free. However, if publication houses are charging for news on their website, Facebook users can still read one free article following which a user will be asked to subscribe to the publication house.
Over the years, Facebook and Google have been drawing a lot of flak from news creators for not paying them for their content which is getting shared on their platforms by more than a billion users. Australian regulators recently drafted legislation that would allow publishers in the country to negotiate compensation with both Facebook and Google sharing or displaying their stories on their respective platforms.
Facebook hopes to change the existing dynamics and hopefully pave the way for other social media platforms to follow its path in creating a profitable environment for news creators and publications.
The post Facebook To Unveil Facebook News On Its Platform appeared first on Startup Stories.
Author: Sampath Pavan Kuppili
Source : https://www.startupstories.in/latest-news/facebook-to-unveil-facebook-news-on-its-platform
Date : 2020-08-27T07:35:16.000Z