The latest move from Facebook comes just months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was mulling building a dedicated tab for news. (Image source: Bloomberg)Facebook is reportedly holding talks with big and famous news publishers in the US to secure licenses to their stories for publishing them on its website. The representatives of the social media giant have told the top news executives that they can pay as much as $3 million per year to license headlines, news stories and other material, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The move comes just a few months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was mulling building a dedicated tab for news, and is willing to pay publishers for high-quality content.
According to the report, Facebook is planning to include these articles for its dedicated news tab which the social media giant plans to launch sometime in the fall season later this year. The deals with the news publishers can last as long as three years and will allow the publishers to have control over how their articles appear on Facebook and whether the readers only receive the snippets such as the headline and a few texts before redirecting to the original website of the publisher.
Facebook has discussed this with various news outlets including ABC News, Dow Jones, The Washington Post and Bloomberg, as per The Wall Street Journal report. However, it isn’t clear if Facebook was offering $3 million to each individual publisher or in total to all news organisations.
As per the report, a person who is familiar with the matter has confirmed that Facebook approached News Corp for paying to license Wall Street Journal stories.
Facebook and Google have been blamed in the past by the news industry for using their content for free, while the social media platforms have earned most of the digital ad revenues affecting the finances of the online news industry.
Also Read|Facebook to put its name on Instagram and WhatsApp
According to the Associated Press, a bipartisan bill that was introduced in the US Congress this year would grant an antitrust exemption to the news publishers, and let them work together to negotiate payments from the top technology companies.
