Facebook wants to host content on other sites

    The largest social network in the world wants to take another step to become the "whole Internet" - the Wall Street Journal journalists say that the company of Mark Zuckerberg is negotiating with online publications about the possibility of full posting of their content on Facebook. If now sites link to their material on their page, then the network user sees only a picture, a caption and a few lines of text. If the Facebook proposal is accepted, that sites will be able to fully post their publications in the user’s feed without requiring him to follow the link, everything can be read without leaving Facebook.

    Both parties benefit from such a solution, which is called Instant Articles on the social network. On the one hand, a user of a social network will not need to go to a third-party site if he is interested in something. On the other hand, in order to compensate for the loss of traffic to sites, Facebook offers publishers to keep all advertising revenue to themselves. According to sources of WSJ journalists, materials from sites such as the BuzzFeed, The New York Times and National Geographic will appear on the social network by the end of May.

    Facebook brings yet another benefit to the end user from such a solution. When viewing a news feed from a mobile device, opening third-party links and navigating to a site can be both long or expensive, taking into account the fact that content that is unnecessary to a user can easily appear on it. If the text of the entire article is available immediately, then this problem disappears by itself. For such a solution, Facebook is likely to provide publishers with more advanced text preparation tools than they currently have.

    However, some online publications have doubts. Despite the fact that for many of them the number of conversions from Facebook is about 60%, few want to bind themselves completely to the social network. The fact that Facebook willingly gets access to the statistics of publications and will be able to use it to their advantage by manipulating the cost of advertising also raises questions.

    The Russian social network "Vkontakte" also has a full view of articles, links to which are left by users. At the same time, the article looks like formatted text and illustrations for it - it is convenient to read it. In 2012, the leadership of the Vedomosti newspaper stated that this Vkontakte function violated their copyrights and demanded that the social network stop using it. A little later, links to Vedomosti became inactive, and the newspaper itself in response to this step closed its community on a social network.

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