According to reports, Facebook is working on something new. Well not new entirely but new to Facebook, and as we managed to find out this social media giant will launch a subscription-based news product. This was announced at a conference in New York by Facebook’s news partnerships head Campbell Brown.
As we managed to find out this new feature will likely allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook’s Instant Articles and after that, it will guide readers to the publisher’s home page in order to allow you an option for a digital subscription, or at least that is what TheStreet reported. The idea for a paywall has spent a lot of time on the drawing-board, and its main idea is to create a premium and metered plans. This was drawn from the comments made by Ms. Brown at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit.
Apparently, everyone thinks that Facebook is actually a huge threat especially to writers since it sucks out all digital advertising revenue. If you recall, the first Instant Articles scheme was launched in May 2015, and the plan back then was to allow the publishers to have their content read directly on the Facebook app. After a testing period ended many publishers actually abandoned this platform after their testing showed that they did not increase the traffic on their sites anymore than they would over traditional social media links, plus they thought that the monetization element was “lacking.”
Ever since that “debacle” Facebook has been desperate and they have been giving their best to come up with a solution that will help them avoid losing business to rivals such as Google and Apple News which have, by the way, seen a record growth in their own platforms in recent months. According to what Ms. Brown stated, the new paywall starts testing in October, and it will most likely direct every user to sign up for a digital subscription after reading a certain number of articles. It is a pretty much the same principle that metered paywalls use and work on traditional news websites. According to Brown “One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that “we want a subscription product — we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook.” And that is something we’re doing now. We are launching a subscription product”.
