Facebook wants to compete for the entry of quality content.
There are a lot of new moves recently launched by Facebook in crisis, one of which includes making changes to news recommendations.
At the beginning of this month, Facebook said at the beginning of this month that it will launch the News Tab service. The News Tab service will be embedded in Facebook’s app. As a dedicated distribution channel for news content, News Tab provides news-focused people with more news topics of interest to them. On August 20th, Facebook announced that it will form a small team of senior journalists to recommend important news to various parts of News Tab.
The News Tab is expected to be available by the end of October this year, and it is expected that about 15% of Facebook users will use the News Tab service. According to the 1.5 billion daily users mentioned in Facebook’s earnings report, the News Tab service will be used by more than 200 million people.
Before Facebook’s news recommendations have always claimed to use algorithmic recommendations. However, according to previous reports from foreign media, some of the content “independent contractors” hired by Facebook recommended a lot of biased news during the 2016 US election. This report forced Facebook to lay off a lot of its hot news recommendation team. This matter still causes Facebook to suffer from “fake news.” Therefore, part of the interpretation believes that Facebook formed the News Tab and used the manual editing team to improve the quality of news recommendations.
However, the business significance of News Tab may be more important. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook has recently negotiated with major US media and publishers. Facebook may recommend links to the original content of the media in the News Tab to drive traffic growth. If the major media enters the News Tab, they can share advertising costs with Facebook. If they produce paid content themselves, they can still take away all the paid income.
The launch of News Tab will obviously make Apple feel uneasy.
The News+ subscription service that Apple released in March this year has some similarities with News Tab. It recommends the original content of more than 300 media for readers. News+ will download the magazine data first, and then use the algorithm to recommend the user’s reading habits. Apple took 30% of its membership revenue. The remaining 50% is divided by the media based on the length of time the reader reads the media. Apple News previously had more than 60 million members. However, after the launch of News+, the number of members grew poorly, and the revenue generated by the media was not much.
In addition, News+ does not have its own ads, and does not exist with the media.The case of advertising sub-accounting.
News Tab may have a competitive advantage over News+ on the sub-ledger. For the media, the significance of the News Tab is that it can add a new channel to its revenue.