Commentary

Facebook In Talks To Host News Content

David Carr has scooped us all from beyond the grave: turns out the late, great New York Times media columnist was on the money --  as so often -- about Facebook’s plans to host content from major news organizations directly on its own platform. Carr's reportage from back in October was confirmed and elaborated by a second article in the NYTthis week.

Facebook is said to be in talks with news publishers including the New York Times itself, as well as BuzzFeed and National Geographic. News stories would be hosted on Facebook and the social network would share the ad revenue with the publishers. Among other benefits, this would mean Facebook users could read news content from reputable sources without having to leave the site.

As Carr noted in his original column, by hosting news content directly on Facebook’s servers, such an arrangement would be especially beneficial for mobile users, who wouldn’t have to wait around so long for advertising to load from slow-moving news sites -- much of it, of course, now delivered in real time (although the exact amount of time involved can vary).

As the NYT article notes, Snapchat recently launched a similar service with Discover, hosting text, photo, and video content from a number of news publishers and splitting the ad revenues.

Last week I wrote about a survey from the Media Insight Project, which found that 88% of Millennials get news from Facebook regularly, with a little over half getting news from Facebook daily. Furthermore, Millennials cited Facebook as their top way to get news for over half of major news and information topics (13 out of 24). 85% of Millennials say staying up on news is important to them, and 69% said they get news daily, regardless of the specific source. 90% of Millennials said they own a smartphone or tablet.

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