Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook so badly that it is reportedly trying to convince news media organizations like BuzzFeed and The New York Times to post content directly on the social media site. Apparently, we have come to the point where clicking is even too much work.
The news was reported by The Times itself on Monday. According to the report, Facebook has been in talks with at least six different media companies about hosting content directly on the social network.
The only organizations named in the report are the Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic. However, the Huffington Post and Quartz were also approached, but didn’t comment. The Guardian and NatGeo also didn’t comment on the report.
Facebook wants to kill the astronomical eight-second wait time we have when we click on a link to get to an article on another site. This is similar to the way Facebook is already trying to take down YouTube, by allowing videos posted directly on Facebook to immediately start playing when it shows up on your feed.
The key to the idea will be figuring out how each side makes money. Many news organizations have paywalls - including the Times - so this model would kill that. The media organizations would, as the Times points out, have to decide that potential shared ad revenue with Facebook would be greater than direct ad revenue from its own site. One idea being floated around is allowing publishers to include one ad within the Facebook-posted story.
Essentially, it looks like Facebook will be the next thing to attack traditional news media. Younger readers no longer pick up newspapers and soon they won’t even have to take the incredibly inconvenient step of clicking on something. They already don’t have to click “play” for a video to start on Facebook and - if this actually happens - they won’t have to click on links either.
It sure sounds great for Facebook, but how could it help news organizations in the long run? Will Facebook not stop until it feels it is the only site on the web? It certainly seems that way, if there really are enough people who think clicking or typing “nytimes.com” is too hard.
screenshot from Facebook.com/NYTimes
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