Facebook is planning to launch a news tab in the fall, and it's getting a lot of attention right now.
The social network is offering major publishers millions of dollars to post their news content in a new tab.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has already held meetings with big players like ABC News, The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Dow Jones, offering them around $3 million a year to license their news content for the new section. The meetings discussed the signing of a three-year contract for the placement of news materials, but at the moment it is not known whether agreements have been concluded with any of the publishers.
The creation of the new tab was announced earlier this year by network founder Mark Zuckerberg. It is assumed that the innovation may be a response to Apple launch own subscription service for news and magazines.
Although Facebook will most likely pay publishers for news content, access to the new section will be completely free for users of the social network. In the news tab, as expected, readers will see both full articles and short excerpts from the article with headlines that will be links to news resources. For publishers, this will be a great way to expand readership and drive additional traffic, but it is expected that Facebook more interested in posting complete materials and paid for such news will be, accordingly, more expensive.
The new tab will be significantly different from all the previous social networking options, as it will be entirely devoted to news and not as focused on advertisements and local news publishers as it was before.
