Facebook is edging higher after announcing a paid news feature
After news media companies requested anti-trust exemptions from Congress to collectively negotiate with large platforms like Facebook and Google, Facebook announced an olive branch of sorts.
According to Leon Lazaroff of TheStreet, Facebook plans on testing a subscription and metered paywall service on its platform as early as October.
The announcement came from remarks by Facebook's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, at an industry conference on Tuesday.
"One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that 'we want a subscription product - we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'" Brown said at the conference.
News publishers asked Congress for the right to negotiate as a group earlier this month. The News Media Alliance, a group of nearly 2,000 publishers, said they were tired of being forced to "play by their rules," referring to Facebook and Google.
The new paywall service could help news media companies bring in more revenue from placing their content on Facebook. The paywall service Facebook announced would be a part of the company's Instant Articles platform. The paywall would start after a user has visited 10 stories from a single publisher, according to TheStreet.
It was not yet clear how Facebook would split the revenue generated by a new paywall service with publishers.
Facebook is up 0.60% on Wednesday after news of the new service was released, trading at about $163.88.
