Facebook’s dedicated news section rolled out in the US just a couple months ago. Now, Facebook says it will expand the news feature internationally within the next six months to a year. That’s earlier than expected, and it could arrive in the UK, Germany, France, India and/or Brazil, Facebook said in a blog post.
As in the US, Facebook will pay news publishers for their content. But the feature will likely change in other ways, to meet the consumer preferences and regulatory demands of other countries.
Facebook’s vice president of global news partnerships Campbell Brown said: “The US launch of Facebook News marked a new chapter in our relationship with the news industry and it’s off to a strong start.
“Built with publisher feedback and insights from people, it is a personalised destination for news within Facebook.
“Helping publishers reach new audiences has been one of our most important goals, and we’ve found over 95% of the traffic Facebook News delivers to publishers is incremental to the traffic they already get from News Feed.
“Based on this progress, we are accelerating our plans to expand internationally. We aim to launch Facebook News in multiple countries within the next six months to a year and are considering the UK, Germany, France, India and Brazil.
“In each country, we’ll pay news publishers to ensure their content is available in the new product.”
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg first set out his ambition for the project in April last year, saying that he wants the tech giant to support struggling news outlets.
Publishers have been increasingly squeezed by Facebook’s dominant position, as more people opt to consume news from Facebook’s News Feed.
It has previously been reported that Facebook is paying some publishers millions of dollars a year in order to include their content in the News section.
Facebook hasn’t exactly perfected the news experience in the US. It has struggled to find enough local news coverage — partly because it ate up local newspapers’ ad dollars. And considering Facebook’s history of spreading misinformation, you might wonder if the platform is up to the task of curating reliable news stories. But the company seems committed to trying.
