Report – Facebook Courts Publishers in Potential Content Hosting Deal

Facebook has an interesting proposition to offer to publishers, but it's not one that many of them may be willing to bite into.

The deal, according to The New York Times, will have publishers directly post their content to Facebook's mobile app, with both the publishers and Facebook sharing the spoils between both sides. This would have websites hosting their content on Facebook without the riffraff that one would normally get on a publisher site, resulting in a smoother and free-flowing way for readers to access articles. This is, however, one individual option Facebook is offering, and it isn't sure yet how the revenue will be split.

While this may seem like a cozy deal for readers, or consumers, the Times opines that it may not be the same way for publishers. This is because such an arrangement would suggest Facebook is tightening its grip on media, and controlling how publishers want to serve content to their readers. Still, others believe that it would behoove publishers to remain on Facebook's good side, even if both sides acting cordially would mean staying fairly apart from each other.

Speaking to The New York Times, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox tried to allay some of those concerns. 'We are at the very beginning of a conversation and it's very important that we get this right,' he said. 'Because we play an increasingly important role in how people discover the news that they read every day, we feel a responsibility to work with publishers to come up with as good an experience as we can for consumers. And we want and need that to be a good experience for publishers as well.'

Though details on the deal are still cropping up slowly, this wouldn't be the first content partnership between Facebook and publishers if it does get hammered out. Several leading publications teamed up with Facebook to create Social Reader apps, and while a lot of them were well-received, the deals proved to be one-sided, with less click-through to publisher sites and more activity on Facebook's ecosystem.

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