Report Says Facebook Meeting With News Companies About Hosting Their Content On The Social Network
By Melony Roy
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Facebook is trying to partner with media outlets to place their pages inside the social network's app but is it a win/win for both sides?
With over two billion users, Facebook is a major traffic driver for a lot of news sites. According to the New York Times, the social network is in talks with "at least half a dozen" media companies to publish their content directly to the platform.
David Boardman,Temple's Dean of Media and Communications and a former newspaper editor, says it's a mixed bag for news organizations.
"On one hand, it is likely to produce a much better user experience, because there won't be a delay that you sometimes get from going to a news site from Facebook, Boardman says, "but it also has the danger of you turning over some amount of revenue and you're turning over a lot of user customer data over to Facebook."
The New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographics, and Huffington Post are among the outlets reportedly involved in talks with the network.
"Under this plan, it's in Facebook's incentive to push content onto you that maybe hasn't been recommended by anybody so that it can drive up traffic and ad rates," Boardman says, "so it gives Facebook an inordinate amount of control."
There is little detail on how the potential partnership the will work and look on the social network.
