Mark Zuckerberg just revealed Facebook's new strategy to save the media industry: subscriptions.
After years of simply forcing news organizations to heel to the almighty algorithm and craft their content for the News Feed, Facebook has added several features in the hopes of winning back the love of publishers. One of the biggest changes to come is subscriptions via Facebook.
SEE ALSO:Facebook is making a tiny tweak to display logos from publishers more visiblyHere's how it works: Publishers using Instant Articles, Facebook's fast-loading article pages, will be able to have a paywall (certain number of articles per month) or have locked articles (freemium model). For either case, Facebook users will be prompted to subscribe to read more. All payments will be processed directly via publishers' websites, and Facebook will not take a cut—at least not now.
"If people subscribe after seeing news stories on Facebook, the money will go directly publishers who work hard to uncover the truth, and Facebook won't take a cut. We plan to start with a small group of U.S. and European publishers later this year and we’ll listen to their feedback," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.
The update is another incentive for publishers to use Instant Articles rather than just share their links, which is crucial for some media outlets. The Guardianand the New York Times both dropped from the Instant Articles program, citing that they did not see a good subscriber conversion rate.
"The simple answer is [Instant Articles] simply wasn’t performing for us on an advertising and subscription conversion front. We ran a test in August, September of last year where we were all in and all out," Kinsey Wilson, editor for strategy and innovation at The New York Times, told Mashableearlier this year.
Facebook supports paywalls and subscription models for publishers that do not use Instant Articles, as in publishers could share locked content on Facebook and users sign in to read it. The company will maintain that feature while it introduces subscriptions for Instant Articles.
Zuckerberg also touted another product update made earlier this week. When Facebook users search for an article or see one in the trending news section, there will now be publisher logos next to the article. That's in an effort to help publishers build more awareness, rather than have readers not pay attention to where the article came from.
"Eventually, our goal is to put a publisher's logo next to every news article on Facebook so everyone can understand more about what they're reading," Zuckerberg wrote.
According to Zuckerberg's post, many of these updates were inspired by conversations he had with news organizations. Amid his travels throughout the states to visit average citizens, it seems he's also had fruitful conversation with publishers. Those comes after he denied that fake news was a problem during the U.S. presidential election.
"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience," Zuckerberg said at a conference in November.
If Zuckerberg would like to talk to this reporter, he can find me on Twitter.
Here's his full post:
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