Does Facebook want news websites to shut down?

Facebook, the biggest social platform out there, attracts everyone—be it a common man or the best brand, everyone shouts out loud using the platform. More than 1 billion users are posting some information on Facebook each day. However, users see these posts on their timeline and when there is a link in it, you are thrown out of the Facebook app or page into a conventional browser. This could be a cause of irritation to most as you would need an additional app or program to get the complete information from the post, and most of all; slow loading websites are the biggest concern.

To cut it short, Facebook is planning ways to keep you stuck in the same all or browser window. The social giant is in talks with media houses and publishers to make their content available online, within Facebook itself. This would take away the need for the user to click on the link and open the original content on another app or browser tab, giving him, or her, the complete information on the Facebook post itself.

According to the New York Times, now the entire story would be available inside Facebook itself.

However, this will take a few months to implement and a few media houses are already testing it from their end. Media partners with the Facebook on the new venture are The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic will be entirely testing the new technology from Facebook.

But how will it benefit the companies by moving away from their website to Facebook? This could be a huge loss as new readers will not be dragged to the parent website and advertisement revenue will take a huge beating. On the other hand, websites will also not be able to track user behaviour, interests and browsing habits.

Facebook has the answer to these too—revenue sharing. Facebook has discussed revenue sharing schemes with the participating media houses and some portion of the Facebook’s income will be shared with them. The income will come in from the advertisements shown alongside the content.

Though most would enjoy the new experience, it could also pose a huge issue with Facebook users as they will now be forced to see more ads on their timeline. Facebook has recently been doing some cleanup on their social platform—cleaning junk from their feeds, and featuring leads that have a stronger engagement. This could spell as great news for media houses as good content will not be promoted automatically.

Presently nothing rivals Facebook as it is presently the number one source of attracting traffic for most media houses. Though Google and Twitter have a hand in the traffic numbers too, nothing beats Facebook when it comes to user engagement.

If this is true, Facebook will now see more news and content generated by friends rather than media houses and the reader experience will increase as pages will load much faster. Could this be a threat to journalism?