Facebook wants to start natively hosting 3rd party content from news organizations with no link-clicking required, and the reason they give is that websites take too long to load. This was revealed by the New York Times in a post that indicated that the Social Media giant’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has been in talks with at least six media companies about publishing their content directly on the site.
NYT, says that the first big publications to participate in Facebook’s new experiment will be The New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographic and our sister publication The Huffington Post. The ourfit has a vested interest in mobile, hence it stepping in.
It’s no secret that most websites make their money from online ads, and these ads contribute a big percentage to the load time of most of these pages. Whether Facebook plans to compensate these publications from the expected loss in ad revenue is a another matter, but from what the NYT says, it doesn’t seem like this pitch is going over too well, and probably for good reason. Facebook hasn’t exactly established much of a revenue (or traffic-data) sharing precedent, and at this stage, the whole deal looks very one-sided: Users stay on Facebook longer while news organizations sacrifice audience info and advertising income in exchange for eyeballs on its content.
