Facebook working on a plan to pick news from favored media partners
Facebook working on a plan to pick news from favored
media partners
By Alex Heath December 2, 2016
Facebook is working on a new feature that will showcase
lists of curated content from publishers directly in the News Feed, according
to two people familiar with the project and internal documentation seen by
Business Insider.
The feature is called Collections and functions similarly
to Snapchat's Discover section, which showcases news stories, listicles,
videos, and other content submitted by handpicked media partners.
Facebook has approached media and entertainment companies
in recent weeks to create content for Collections, but has not given a time
frame for when the feature will be made available.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Facebook's effort to create Collections comes as it
struggles to distinguish between high-quality content from established media
outlets and the glut of low-quality, fake news stories that go viral across the
social network. The company has faced sharp criticism for its role in spreading
fake news stories during the US presidential election.
The move could also help Facebook forge stronger ties
with publishers as it competes with fast-growing Snapchat. The app's Discover
section of youthful, tabloid-esque news stories is seen every day by its more
than 150 million users.
Early Collections partners have been told that content
they create will be inserted into the News Feed by Facebook, effectively giving
them direct — and potentially much broader — access to the social network's
vast audience of 1.8 billion users. Currently, publishers must either garner
likes from users for their content to be seen in the News Feed or pay to boost
their exposure through Facebook's sponsored-post program.
It's unclear if Collections will feature advertising, and
if so, whether Facebook will share the ad revenue with publishers or offer
publishers an option to monetize the content themselves, as it currently does
with its Instant Articles service.
Another sticking point could be the extent to which
Facebook shares data about readers with publishers, and how easy it will be for
publishers to bring readers to their websites.
Facebook has historically had difficulty getting directly
involved with news curation.
The company's latest experiment with curated content from
publishers was a breaking news app called Notify that the company shuttered
earlier this year after only seven months. The social network's Trending news
section came under fire earlier this year after it was reported that Facebook's
editors were purposely suppressing conservative-leaning news items from
appearing on the list.
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