Facebook to Reportedly Host Other Sites' News Content

Furthering efforts to promote news consumption on its platform, Facebook will reportedly start hosting articles from publishers, and the launch could happen as early as this month.

As per a report by the Wall Street Journal the news hosting programme is called Instant Articles and launch partners are said to include Buzzfeed, National Geographic, and The New York Times.

The WSJ reports that while mobile publishers push content to Facebook right now in the form of links, it can take up to take 8 seconds for the pages to load. By hosting content on Facebook, the world's most popular social network aims to reduce this friction.

The report adds that publishers do not need to pay the social network for the hosting, and will in fact get to keep all the revenue earned from ad sales on the hosted pages. Publishers would keep 100 percent of the revenue from ads they sell on Facebook-hosted content, but if Facebook sells the ads, it would keep 30 percent of the revenue.

Facebook has in the past few years taken several steps towards news hosting, and made its intentions clear to publishers as well. Publishers on the other hand have long had a love-hate relationship with Facebook, being forced to acknowledge the readership numbers social networks can yield.

The social network had back in 2013 started making changes to its design to better support news reading, optimising the News Feed to be a type of 'personalised newspaper'. After providing publisher tools like Stories to Share and a study on how to quell rumours, CEO Mark Zuckerberg in early November reiterated the firm's aim to make Facebook "the perfect personalised newspaper for every person in the world.