Facebook in talks with publishers on supporting subscription models | Hacker News Reader

Facebook in talks with publishers on supporting subscription models

reuters.com

51 pointsProAm37 comments

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The title makes it seem like TheStreet is the product but it isn't.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/14233293/1/facebook-s-campbe...

That's a very misleading usage of the colon (:) punctuation mark. Is it even correct to use it like that in english?

Yes, it is used to denote the source of a bit of news or a paraphrased quote.

When the source is leading it makes sense...

Source: Headline

This reads much better

> TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product

I just said that it's correct. Which it is. If you don't like it, great.

This should not be downvoted. One sees the source before the colon more often than after the colon, but it is common to see the source after the colon in some publications. I see several instances (e.g., "Corporate lobbying helped derail border tax: senior Republican") on the Reuters homepage right now.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

I think it is more correct (and less ambiguous) to have 'TheStreet: Facebook to launch news subscription product'

I wonder why they did not use this common variant,

"Facebook to launch news subscription product. -TheStreet"

It's a strange attributional convention used in headlines and links by some publications. I've never understood why, as it reads so confusingly, snd the reverse usage (source: topic) seems readily and intuitively available instead. But it's still common to see (topic: source) in certain house styles.

This should be the target of the submitted link instead, IMO.

To save someone the confusion and clicks:

TheStreet is a media/news company [1].

The product in question:

> The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription

This HN entry is actually a Reuters article about the TheStreet article about the product. [2]*

[1] http://corporate.thestreet.com/

[2] https://www.thestreet.com/video/14234594/you-might-have-to-p...

* I'm not sure this is exactly what's being referred to, because TheStreet appears to publish somewhere between 1 and 14 articles mentioning "facebook" every hour [3], so this was the first mention I saw as I scrolled through.

[3] https://www.thestreet.com/find/results/index.html?q=facebook

I'm more in favor of a move like this than I am having my required messenger app spammed with advertisements. At least this is completely optional.

The two options are compatible :)

Speaking of how horrible messenger is, I was just recently in a developing country, which gave me an opportunity to download messenger light.

It's amazing, it's so much less bloated and faster than normal messenger, and uses less data too. It doesn't have stories or the rich integration with giphy etc., but that doesn't bother me at all.

Didn't know there was a messenger light. Maybe because there wasn't when I was traveling a few years back? I'd be really interested to see it. I did install FB light on a phone I bought in a developing country and was so excited by it. The whole app was maybe a few MB at the most and it was nothing but my friends content and the basic functionality of the early Facebook wall/feed (minus graffiti.) Like stepping back in time kinda. Made me remember how simple a concept FB is/was under all the algorithms, data mining and JavaScript.

That app, ironically enough, is a major reason I'm not on FB today. When I got home and installed the standard app (at 3xx MB) and immediately felt like I was tricked into installing bloated adware. It ate my data up (comparatively) and provided me with little to no extra features beyond a prettier UI. More ads, more analytics, more shitty newsfeed clutter. I uninstalled it and haven't been back to FB since :)

You can easily sideload it on Android and works well even on our countries. :)

"The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook's Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher's home page to opt for a digital subscription"

I wouldn't call that a news subscription product.

Yeah...I'd much rather they offer a Netflix-esque platform for news articles. I can't really justify subscribing to a single site, but if I could get most of the major ones with one affordable subscription I'd probably do it.

>I can't really justify subscribing to a single site

I hear this all the time, it has to be a side effect of getting all your news through facespace and other news aggregators. There's really only a handful of newspapers worth subscribing to (in the US), if you aren't reading at least one regularly enough that you'd pay for it if you had to, your money is pretty much no good. I'd expect to see more and more paywalls in the coming months/years, the economics are better, pandering to large volumes of low value readers is a race-to-the-bottom that won't support good journalism.

Honestly no, none of them are publishing content that is worth what they're trying to charge. At $15/mo, the NYT seems to be selling a feeling of intellectual superiority more than they're selling better journalism.

If you have Prime, I think the Washington Post subscription offer of 6 months free and then $3.99/month after that is a very reasonable value.

That is a great value. Way more in line with what one site ought to cost in my opinion.

Okay, that makes FB and the publishers more money, but how does it solve FB's fake news problem? Or does it exacerbate it?

Google gives you the content for free via search as long as they get your search queries. Facebook gives you your friends content for free but could allow publishers to charge for access to their streams.

Virtual currency will run the new internet I feel - not neutrality necessarily, but something that will work.

Quite a few news sites have paywalls even through Google search, like wsj

I always wondered why nobody implemented an App store for news and magazine articles that can be accessed through the internet (i.e. not device specific).

Why didn't Amazon do this? Or Apple? Google?

It would be against the interests of Google for people to subscribe/pay for articles rather than searching through Google News for ad-supported articles.

It's against Apple's interests to do anything that isn't device-specific and the same could probably be said about Amazon & Kindle.

True. However, it can be against your interests, but you should always consider: what if someone else does this.

I knew a few people that were trying to do this, but I'm not sure they succeeded.

How big a cut will Facebook take?

I submitted a link to the Verge article on this with the title "Facebook to add paywall features later this year" which is the main highlight here to me.

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