Facebook Wants To Become Your One-Stop Shop For News

Facebook is looking to expand its wide range of existing services by becoming the main source of news content for its users.

According to reports, the social network giant is in talks with a number of news organisations regarding the publishing of content directly onto its site, rather than users having to click a link to be redirected to a story.

The New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographic and The Huffington Post are among those who have held talks with Facebook so far, the New York Times reports, with the site set to launch trials within the next few months.

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The move appears to be one primarily motivated by time, namely, the time that Facebook users spend navigating to other websites.

News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a separate web browser, which typically takes around eight seconds to load.

Facebook, which has publicly stated in the past that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless, thinks that this is too much time, especially when using a mobile device.

However, it is unclear at the moment what benefits the publications themselves would gain from the deal, which would see the sites lose valuable data on their user trends, and would also adversely affect advertising revenues.

How a story would be selected form Facebook’s ‘Trending’ section, which displays current or popular news stories on a users home page, could also be affected, with partnering organisations potentially gaining an unfair advantage.

Earlier this year, Facebook was forced to tweak the algorithms it uses to source and host news feed content following a raft of hoaxes and spam affecting users.

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