FACEBOOK is hoping to secure deals with big-name news brands in an attempt to be a relevant news source again, according to recent reports.
The company is said to be willing to pay millions to bring back publishers that have been put off working with them due to recent ‘fake news’ scandals and will be creating a dedicated news section for them which could appear like a second News Feed.
According to , Facebook is offering up to $3million (£2.5million) a year for the licensing rights of some news outlets.
Facebook plans to create a dedicated news section for reputable news articles later this year, which may work like a separate News Feed.
This sounds similar to a move by Snapchat which saw the company create a dedicated news page so that information from news brands wasn’t mixed in with Snapchat stories from other accounts, such as friends, family and celebrities.
The companies said to be in early discussions with Facebook include ABC News, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and The Washington Post.
Publishers could sign three year long deals with Facebook but would still get to control how the articles appear on the site.
The plans could revive the huge amount of referral traffic that Facebook used to drive to news publishers and companies, which would be a very popular move with these firms.
Facebook started to downgrade pages and non-individualised posts from News Feeds a few years ago.
This was due to the company being accused of enabling fake news to spread easily and pigeon holing users so they could only read certain types of news.
Facebook has had quite a rocky relationship with publishers in the past because some publishers blame Facebook for taking online ad revenue from them.
Last year, Campbell Brown, the company’s head of news partnerships, essentially told publishers to stay off the platform if they didn’t like it when she : ““If anyone feels this isn’t the right platform for them, they should not be on Facebook.”
If Facebook can win over publishers with its pricey deals and promises of more traffic then this relationship could be restored.
However, Facebook still needs to work on keeping young users and potentially new readers for news outlets on the platform and avoid anymore clickbait full News Feed scenarios.
We have reached out to Facebook for comment.
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- In 2007, Facebook’s first targetted advertising product, Beacon, caused outrage because there was initally no opt-in option about the kinds of information users wanted to share
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- In 2010, it was revealed that advertisers were using a privacy loophole to retrieve revealing personal information about Facebook users and the company had to change its software
- In 2011, the FTC charged Facebook with lying to customers about how their information could be kept private but making it public anyway
- 2018 saw Facebook’s biggest privacy scandal to date with reports that Cambridge Analytica misused user data and Facebook had to admit that it had failed to protect its users
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