New Delhi | Jagran Tech Desk: Mark Zuckerberg-owned Facebook will launch ‘Facebook News’, a dedicated news tab featuring the news published by various media houses the social-media platform is going to have a paid partnership with. Facebook has said that it will launch the feature “within the next six months to a year” in the countries including India, Germany, France, and the UK.
What is ‘Facebook News’ feature?
Facebook News is not to be put in context with the News Feed, a user gets from his/her personalised feed, comprised by the posts shared by your Facebook Friends and pages you follow. ‘Facebook News’ will be a specifically dedicated app for the Newsy content, which will feature the news posted by the publishers the social media giant is set to partner with in the coming weeks. Under this feature, Facebook will pay the publishers for their content, an amount which is likely to be significantly more than the ad revenues Facebook shares with the publishers for the content shared through its platform right now.
The ‘Facebook News’ will have ‘Today’s stories’ section, which will be modulated by a team of journalists employed by Facebook itself. Users will be able to ‘Personalise’ their ‘Facebook News’ feed under various topics based on the news one reads, shares and follows.
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Other than this, users will have the option to link the paid news subscriptions with their Facebook accounts.
‘Facebook News’ already launched in the US
Since October 2019 onwards, Facebook users in the United States continue to use the ‘Facebook News’ feature with the social media platform claiming over 95 per cent addition in the traffic delivered to the news publishers through the feature in comparison to the typical News feed.
Why ‘Facebook News’ when normal feed also has significant news content?
Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have faced huge criticism for the way they control the online ad market, and the little they share with the content creators from the ad revenues the content published on the platform generates. Both Google and Facebook control more than 70 per cent of the online ad market share in India. Facebook News, thus, is an attempt to streamline the flow of revenue share towards the News publishers themselves; in addition to the fact that Online News viewing patterns of News consumers continue to outpace the other News mediums such as Television and traditional newspapers.