Facebook wants to be a distribution hub for online publishers

Content is king, and Facebook is willing to sacrifice a piece of its ad revenue if that’s what it takes to convince publishers to distribute their content through the social network. While many publishers already post links to their content on Facebook, it requires users to navigate to a separate page, which can be particularly annoying for mobile users.  Facebook wants to make things more convenient for users by hosting the content directly on the app or website, and in return it’s willing to allow these publishers to keep 100% of the revenue from certain ads. 

Facebook Inc. is offering to let publishers keep all the revenue from certain advertisements, in a bid to persuade them to distribute content through the social network, according to people familiar with the matter. Many publishers now post links to their content on Facebook, which has become an important source of online traffic for news sites. But opening those links on a mobile device can be slow and frustrating, taking around eight seconds. The Facebook initiative, dubbed Instant Articles, is aimed at speeding that process, people familiar with the matter said. Facebook plans to start hosting news and videos from BuzzFeed, The New York Times, National Geographic and other publishers as early as this month, those people said. While the proposal has attracted interest from some publishers, many others are wary of tethering themselves more tightly to Facebook. Big Web publishers on average get about 60% of their traffic through referrals from Facebook. In a survey by the Pew Research Center last year, 48% of respondents said they read news about politics and government on Facebook in the past week, about as many as got news about these topics from local television.