Facebook to launch news feature in the UK

A news feature will soon be available in the UK. Many major news publishers including Channel 4, Sky News and the Guardian have already signed up with Facebook in order to deliver content to the news hungry consumers in the UK.

United States were the first to receive this service in 2020 and now the UK will follow the Facebook news interaction. It comes, however, in a time where the tech giant’s relationship with the media is quite tense around the world.

An example of this would be in Australia, where Google recently threatened to pull out if forced by law to enter commercial agreements with news publishers.

Facebooks launch of Facebooks news, is a way of trying to reduce the friction between it and news publishers. It also makes sense to do so, as advertising spend has moved from individual news outlet to the large tech firms instead.

The feature of Facebook news would be a mix of daily news and personalized news, which would be determined by Facebooks own algorithm. This open up new opportunities for the news group to target a specific consumer for advertising, and provide publishers with new opportunities. In return, Facebook will pay publishers for content that is not already on the platform.

From the American experience the idea look promising and Facebook claims that more than 95% of the traffic on Facebook news is from people who have not read the publications before.

Big names like, Telegraph, The Daily mail, The Independent and Cosmopolitan have already signed up and many more are expected to follow.

A story on Facebook will often attract more readers, as their reach is huge when it comes to traffic around the internet. They also constantly evolve different algorithms creating even more opportunities and encourage organizations to use features like instant articles, or to make video content.

Future expansions, to other countries like France and Germany, are also in the works, and Facebook has announced in a blog that it has always been a goal to build sustainable business models to help support the industry.

Newsroom seems to become a bigger part of Facebook in the future and hopefully it will benefit the consumers with much more news content.

Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55799656