Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is offering a revenue share deal to the publishers that will enable newspapers, magazines, and websites to send their articles for the social network directly through its mobile app, according to a report from the New York Times. The social networking website has initiated a “listening tour” with publishers to discuss better ways to collaborate on the mobile platform.
Improved user experience
Facebook’s mobile app is visited by 654 million users daily, and the company is making efforts to ramp up its mobile offering to load up content quickly. However, publisher websites are often slow due to the amount of advertising they host, where the number of auctions happens in milliseconds to decide the highest bidder for an ad spot. Therefore with the new initiative, Facebook wants to offer a quick solution to make mobile experience smoother for the users.
Chris Cox, Chief Product Officer of Facebook, told the New York Times, “We are at the very beginning of a conversation, and it’s very important that we get this right.” Cox added that the company is playing a very important role in the habits of people on how they find the news every day, which is why Facebook feels the need to work with the publishers to give the best experience to consumers. Cox said that Facebook wants publishers to have a positive experience as well.
Publishers need Facebook
the Direct to Facebook publishing approach comes with a condition that any advertising revenue would be shared. According to the New York Times report, the offering from Facebook may not sit very well with publishers because this indicates the increasing control of Facebook over media, which is a principal source of referral traffic to the majority of digital publishers. If the publishers strike a deal for content sharing, it would mean that they are losing the right to data about how their readers view their content.
That said, it is important for publishers to build cordial relationship with Facebook, a social networking site with a user base of over 1.3 billion.
Earlier this year, Facebook unveiled a standalone app named Paper to compete with the new aggregation of apps like Feedly and Flipboard. However, the app did not garner much popularity.
