from the if-you-pay-for-it,-are-you-no-longer-the-product? dept.
Facebook will start managing paid subscriptions to publishers' posts later this year.
AdWeek reports Facebook Says It Will Start Testing a Subscription-Based News Product in October:
A paywall is coming to Facebook, much to the delight of publishers.
Head of news partnerships Campbell Brown made the announcement at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit in New York Tuesday, as reported by Leon Lazaroff of TheStreet.
Her announcement comes just over one week after several prominent publishers, as well as smaller newspapers—nearly 2,000 publishers in total—teamed up to form trade organization The News Media Alliance with the aim of pushing Congress for a limited antitrust exemption to negotiate with Facebook and Google.
According to Business Insider, Facebook is going to let publishers start charging readers to view stories:
With subscriptions, Facebook is opening up another way to make money off its platform at a time when some of its other publisher offerings, such as Instant Articles, have disappointed publishers. Facebook is also testing mid-roll video ads with a handful of publishers that it plans to eventually roll out to everyone.
And from TheStreet we have Facebook Exec Campbell Brown: We Are Launching a News Subscription Product:
"One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that 'we want a subscription product -- we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'" Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, an industry conference, in New York City on July 18. "And that is something we're doing now. We are launching a subscription product."
Related Stories
Facebook has released guidelines for publishers who want to appear in the "news feed":
Facebook has released new guidelines that outline how publishers can adapt to the company's efforts to fight back against fake/false news and other low-quality content.
Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri unveiled the guidelines at an event this morning at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he said they don't represent any changes to Facebook's approach — they're just a way for publishers to understand the strategy.
He added that Facebook's efforts in this area are "targeted at bad actors." But for legitimate publishers, the guidelines can still be important to "make sure you don't get caught up in the crosshairs."
Publishers have panicked at recent news feed changes:
The new feature Facebook is trying out is called Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than just at what your friends are sharing. Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or media organisations whose pages you have liked.
Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia - the experiment went further. For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts - in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the place most users spend their time you had to pay for the privilege.
In a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented the impact. Publishers in his country were seeing just a quarter of the interactions they used to get before the change, he said. What had become a vital and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast. Other journalists around the world have looked into the future and hate what they see. Their organisations have become addicted to Facebook as the one true way of reaching audiences and going cold turkey would be very painful.
Previously: The Tentacles of Facebook
Facebook is Going to Let Publishers Start Charging Readers to View Stories this Autumn
Google, Facebook Algorithms Promote 4chan Threads Identifying Wrong Man as Vegas Shooter
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:35PM (4 children)
You can bet your left cheek that I'm not paying for any of it.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:52PM
I'm willing to bet there are enough people around that will just love this and think it's like the most awesome thing ever. Will there be some kind of microtransaction system or are you just going to connect your creditcard to your facebook profile and then as you visit pages it will deduct the cost automagically? Waiting for the news a few weeks after launch then about how little Johnny (or whomever) has drained their parents bankaccount, or how there is a large uptick of Nigerian princes that need you help with reading a few articles.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday July 20 2017, @02:05AM (1 child)
When the majority of idiots drives many businesses into the Facebook pay platform you might be dragged onto it as well or be denied content.
I think it's the root of many problems. Unqualified people gets to rule insightful ones by the power of share numbers.
(Score: 2) by julian on Thursday July 20 2017, @03:32AM
There's been something of a renaissance of audiobook content in recent years. With all the money flowing into Audible and other companies they've started funding the recording of even more content themselves, which attracts more people. It's a virtuous circle. It also means this content is professionally made, high quality, and being audio it's easy to distribute digitally (being only a fraction of the size of video content). So it ends up on bittorrent.
Text is even cheaper and easier to copy and share. So if more high quality content is being produced because some people on Facebook are paying for it, that'll get shared for free too. If they can't manage to effectively DRM computer programs then text doesn't stand a chance. You literally just copy and paste. It requires so little bandwidth you can use SMS to send it to people.
I recently ended up getting an audible subscription after years of downloading for free, so there is at least a small conversion rate into paying customers. But I'm never rejoining Facebook. It's bad enough they have my old data from 6 years ago and whatever shadow profile they manage to maintain of me despite my best efforts to block them from all of my computing devices.
(Score: 1) by corey on Thursday July 20 2017, @09:52PM
I'm going to express an opinion that's a polar opposite to every comment here and say this might be a good thing.
Not sure how aware everyone here is about how the media is dying and along with it is going good journalism (along with bad - Murdoch et al). But they are, and they're trying to find any way to connect with the younger generations and Facebook is a way for them. Given these generations have grown up selling their personal info for free stuff, it might be a long straw. But I support any way that private companies such as The Guardian can derive income and continue to employ professional journalists to dig deep into issues and keep the politicians in line.
I dislike Facebook like everyone else here and don't have an account but this might be a way for people to access journalistic content without visiting news outlet websites.
All the other ramifications like Facebook knowing exactly what people consume, aucks balls.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:53PM (3 children)
There's two possible outcomes here:
1) This makes Facebook even more irrelevant, or
2) Facebook users will actually pay for this crap, thus harming Facebook users.
Either way, it's a win.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:15AM
Hilariously I'm one of the many people that have never wanted anything to do with it anyway. So I can't tell if you're serious or not when you say it's irrelevant. Are userbases dropping or are they still having that issue of old people/young people not knowing how to co-exist in one place and thus one group is gutted?
Topic: Though initially dickish looking, I bet this will follow a microtransaction model in some way and in all honesty having a paywall can be a good thing depending on what's behind it. If people need to pay to read something then one would hope they studied what they read. Which can certainly not hurt facebook I'm sure.
No actual stats or dates yet though, I'm just seeing what the summary already has: "Yes, a paywall is something we're working on"
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)
I've been a Facebook user for about 6 years. I have a total of 30 people on my friends list, family and close friends only. The rest of Facebook can kiss my ass, and I wouldn't pay a cent to read anything paywalled. There's always Ello when Facebook fails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @08:45AM
Congrats, you're part of the problem.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday July 19 2017, @11:57PM (2 children)
So lemme get this right. Facebook bas built its whole business model around harvesting user information and selling it. It doesn't require users setup a billing method, since they don't pay Facebook, they are in fact the product Facebook sells. But they are going to manage a paywall for content publishers somehow? For the ones who post their material into their Facebook pages, for stories mentioned and passed around on Facebook, or what exactly? And are these publishers going to require users come in from Facebook or require they have a Facebook account or what exactly? At any rate, aren't they selling their immortal souls to Zuckerburg if they use a Facebook signin as their accounting and billing method? And it is the publishers DEMANDING Facebook do this?
Do you know what terrifies me about this? That we might not be at peak stupid yet, that there might be even dumber things to come, that there probably WILL be dumber things.
All because the media companies, who survived a very long time largely on advertising revenue, can't manage to find a way to generate revenue from online ads without enraging the readers to the point they seek out and locate ad blockers. Think about that, the ads are so annoying, so malignant, so disruptive that normal folk go find and install ad blockers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:09AM (1 child)
Agreed. People want their internet stuff for free. FB is free, and if it wasn't people would actually have a strong incentive to try G+ or other alternatives.
What happens when someone copies five paragraphs of the paid-for story into a facebook post? How about one paragraph, but five posts?
I'm all for anything that hurts FB. This is assuming people are gregarious to a degree that I want to believe they're not.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:48AM
They'll use NewsContentID to instantly ban your account!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday July 20 2017, @12:38AM
People run into paywalled content in a sea of free content, and they skip it. Page views and ad impressions drop dramatically.
If the Wall Street Journal or whatever gets an exclusive scoop, that shit is going to be on 100 free news sites within in an hour. When you search a relevant term on Google News or Facebook, you will click on the free news.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PapayaSF on Thursday July 20 2017, @03:13AM (4 children)
If this is a typical subscription paywall, screw it. But if it's micropayments, I support it. Those need some big entity like Facebook to get them going. I want an online economy in which people are paying each other pennies for content. That would really allow free markets to work, and allow small content providers (writers, artists, musicians, etc.) to support themselves with something better than a Patreon model. It could also be the salvation of mainstream newspapers and magazines: No, I'm not going to pay $10/month or $2.95 for an article. Make the article 1 cent or even five cents, and then I'm interested.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday July 20 2017, @03:31AM (3 children)
Think it through. Always stop and ponder how something will be abused.
How will the prices be set? Stop the connection and display a pricetag? Standardize a price in the link text such that the browser can automatically agree to pay that amount when it submits the request? Now imagine one of those or whatever you are thinking of and then ask yourself, how would this be abused to make the Internet a worse place.
Now the big one. You have just taken the incentive to post clickbait and turned it so far beyond 11 you broke the dial. Because now it is all about getting a link to go viral and get as many people as possible to click it. Everything after that doesn't matter, the money is in the account. Imagine the incentive structure you are creating. Faked links, kickback schemes for paid placement, all of it. Do you have a plan for that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 20 2017, @06:45AM
Warez sites have been doing this with link shorteners/redirectors that pay out for ages (they just chain dozens of them). So yes, this is 100% what will happen.
(Score: 2) by PapayaSF on Friday July 21 2017, @04:31AM (1 child)
Remember, this is not a system to just apply to any link that appears anywhere. It's in effect an inexpensive paywall for websites. Might some scammers set up clickbaity sites that don't provide what they claim? Yup. Just like everything else online, you'd have to be careful. But I doubt if the NY Times or Joe Cartoonist or Jane Musician is going to be trying to rip people off for pennies.
I don't see anything that can't be dealt with by a combination of the market and whoever is running the system. Sellers set prices. The system makes sure the displayed price is the charged price. Sites get reputations and reviews. If people can successfully deal drugs over the dark web with cryptocurrency, why is an entirely legal paywall system that uses micropayments such a difficult problem, and so open to abuse?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday July 21 2017, @05:24AM
Oh but it is. That is the whole POINT. The NYT does pretty good selling digital subs, same for the WSJ. Microtransactions aren't for them. They are for all of the other web properties who steadfastly refuse to admit that they are in the selling eyeballs business. That are utterly convinced that the Internet revolutionized all that away, that they are now free of that grubby capitalistic nonsense and can, and should be, free to just create 'great content' and that the money they need to survive on will simply appear by magic. That is why they don't want to build out the billing systems, they demand Zuck do it for them. They don't want to deal with the international aspects either, somebody just solve it and give them money.
So project that defective thinking to the logical conclusion and recoil in horror NOW, before you help bring the nightmare into reality.
Every blog quickly becomes at least a $0.01 link instead of a sidebar link to Patreon because begging causes bad feelz. Ok. Annoying but you just nuked the 3rd world right the f*ck off the Internet as a side effect. And remember that you don't see the content until after payment. Ponder all the ways the Internet would change, all the ways to abuse such a system, all the people who would want a cut and the ways they would dream up to get it. EVERY BAD THING WOULD HAPPEN because the Internet has almost no mechanism to stop abuse, see SPAM. Remember UseNet? And remember that while the 3rd world wouldn't be able to pay the penny to see most links, they would be inversely motivated to harvest hits, since that penny means a lot more to them. One easy way to get content is to simply steal it and sell it cheaper, i.e. piracy. And once money moves across an international border, good luck policing it. Seeing the problems yet? How many more can you find in a half hour of serious effort to find abuses. Now imagine how many the same people who run our current scams will find with their boundless energy.
Then imagine the whole "Pirate Bay" of Internet content that would almost instantly spawn. Now combine the horrors. Remember that problem I mentioned with the 3rd World? How long before "something must be done to address this inequality" and we get tiered pricing structures. Remember what I said about pirating content, buy low, sell high! VPNs would also collide with the "redistribution of information" movement. Hilarity would ensure for sure. But would it be a better Internet?
Now lets get to the actual tech. So Facebook is tapped right into essentially every Internet user's bank account and to make it painless it 'just works' in the background as your browser opens pages. What happens when your PC gets infested and starts quietly opening pages in the background? Currently the most they can do is try to steal your credit card and worry about ordering something without triggering the safeguards when they try to deliver it to an address in Estonia. But now they trigger thousands / millions of pageviews to servers spread around the world and with luck have it all converted to BTC and discontinue those virtual hosts before anyone catches on. Amazon might have "one click shopping" but it only delivers stuff to your home address. Now every can browser quickly distribute money around the world. Most people run Windows. Connect the dots.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Thursday July 20 2017, @01:45PM
Among the possible outcomes: news sites that by advertising on FB get their paywalled articles ignored, so both lose even more of whatever little cred they still have. Greed ftw!