Facebook considering India for launching product
New Delhi: In a blog post, Facebook has announced it is planning to launch Facebook News in multiple countries within the next six months to a year and is considering India and other markets such as the UK, Germany, France, and Brazil. "In each country, we’ll pay news publishers to ensure their content is available in the new product," Campbell Brown, VP, global news partnerships wrote in the post dated August 25.
Facebook refers to the new product as a ‘personalised’ destination for news within Facebook with users getting top headlines and stories for the day based on their interests. News is only available on the Facebook apps for Android and iPhone in the US currently.
Brown said the US launch of Facebook News marked a new chapter in the company’s relationship with the news industry and it’s off to a ‘strong start.’
Facebook News was launched in the US in June.
“Helping publishers reach new audiences has been one of our most important goals, and we’ve found over 95% of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed,” he added.
Sensing declining ad revenues due to Covid 19 in the media industry, some countries have been demanding tech companies should pay publishers for news content.
Late last month, Australia’s competition regulator had announced its plan to force companies like Google and Facebook to pay news outlets for their content under a news media bargaining code.
The companies could be asked to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for non compliance under the code released by The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as per reports.
In France, antitrust regulators ordered Google to pay for content from French publishers in April.
Facebook has been at the forefront a political controversy around hate speech posts in India after a Wall Street Journal report alleged that a senior Facebook executive opposed applying its hate speech rules on controversial posts of a BJP leader and three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups for violating its standards.