This confirms that the Social Network is all set to start hosting contents natively from other news organizations. This plan for sure is to make the news organizations worried as there are chances for its readers to go away from their own ecosystems and also accumulation of valuable data is to happen. For this, it seems Facebook is calming their fears. It is been claimed that the Zuckerberg and Co. intends to start testing this new format in the next few months. As confirmed by The New York Times‘ there are atleast six media companies with whom Facebook is to partner in publishing their content directly on its site and they are The New York Times, National Geographic , BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and others with whom discussion is still happening. Also as informed by a known source, it seems The Times and Facebook are moving closer towards a firm deal. So very soon much can be heard of this.
What could be the main reason for Facebook taking up this new format? The reason is simple, on clicking a link, the site takes too long to load and according to Facebook on mobiles, it takes long time to load an average eight-second page-load. Looks like Facebook is much interested with mobile app.
Now if Facebook is going to publish the contents directly without the need to go to the news organizations site how they would get benefitted, and for this Facebook has got a plan. To have the proposal more appealing to publishers, the social giant has conferred ways for publishers to make profit from advertising that is to run alongside the content. All what is expected by Facebook as confirmed by it is to make the consuming experience of online content more perfect and easy.
Long Time needed to open a link:
Currently, News articles on Facebook get linked to the publisher’s own website that takes about eight seconds to load on tapping the link. And according to Facebook this seems to be too much time and that to in case of mobile devices it is a very long time and especially on considering the readers enthusiasm to read the content, even milliseconds matter.
Also it is been said that Facebook in addition to hosting the content directly on its site is also making talks with publishers to check out other possible technical ways to hurry up with the delivery of the articles.
Talking on this subject, Edward Kim, chief executive of SimpleReach – the analytics and Distribution Company said that even marginal increase in the sites speed means big increase in terms of user satisfaction and traffic. So Facebook with this in mind focuses on these small improvements rather than it getting profit from media companies’ deals. Kim also specified that for publishers there might be a lot of implications that could really come down by the way Facebook structures it and ensure it turns out to be a win on both sides.
Facebook Video has now become increasingly popular among its users and advertisers and the company is to introduce at its developer conference, the expanded tools to have video ads placed inside non-Facebook applications.
It is not just Facebook as even the media companies are in need to have improved user experiences for which they are treading carefully.
BuzzFeed, on the other hand has an explicit policy of having its content spread outside of its own site but The Times uses a subscription model for providing some benefit in terms of the company’s revenue. It definitely needs to weigh the benefits on reaching with Facebook’s users and also with the ad revenue that is to come along with it. Again it is to be reminded that all this comes against the outlook of giving away its content with the loss in the click count that is to be received for its own site as it is to stay within Facebook instead.
There again the remarkable point is that some of the news organizations has stayed cool to the proposal. And for example, some of the “The Guardian” employees have informally recommended to other publications colleagues that all publishers should come together to negotiate with the deals that is to work for the whole industry and should hang on with the control of their own advertising, if or not Facebook hosts their content.
The new plan supported by Mark Zuckerberg’s top lieutenant, Chris Cox on product matters is to remove the usual ads that are placed by publishers around their content. According to a known source of the matter, though the revenue-sharing ideas are in fluctuation state still, publishers are to be allowed to display a custom formatted single ad within each Facebook article.
Historically, if noted Facebook has not made any kind of revenue-sharing with content publishers. It was like have the content on it where it is to send traffic to the publishers’ site. And now it is to experiment this revenue-sharing options.
If remembered, Facebook in December started showing NFL clips that were sponsored by Verizon. Payment was received for the clips from Verizon which ran an ad at the end of every clip that were sent to people’s news feeds. Later the revenue was split between Facebook and NFL.
Facebook’s new proposal gets another risk for publishers: which is the fear of losing valuable consumer data. Once an article is clicked by a reader, a range of tracking tools enable the host site to gather valuable information about the reader as who they are, what is their browsing history and what they often do on the web. So with this new plan of Facebook, all these data might go to Facebook which like any other company might use the information to track and target consumers effectively for advertisers. Also there has been no detail revealed as to how much of those data gathered would be shared by Facebook.
And finally, if Facebook succeeds in having the experimental stage moved further and get the contents hosted on its site making it the commonplace, then it could turn out to be a substantial traffic loss for those who do not participate in the plan. Their content articles might open very slowly than their rivals which might make the readers avoid their sites over time.
And what more, Facebook now changing its news feed to videos that are hosted directly on the site to play automatically, presenting them with an advantage than the YouTube videos could also change the feed to prioritize on the articles that are hosted on it directly.
Alan D. Mutter, author of the blog “Reflections of a Newsosaur” and a newspaper consultant states that all this could ultimately make it a point that every publisher over some time might need to allow their content shown more freely outside their own sites. But for time being, this plan might be a wary change for publishers who are more comfortable in controlling their own band, audience and advertising revenue. He also said that Facebook that is to only benefit from this is to improve user satisfaction and keep them on its site with better contents shown allowing better rated advertising.
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