Facebook revealed on Tuesday its plans to launch news tab in UK by 2021 worth £5bn, the firm will pay publishers millions of dollars to feature their content. The publishers including The Economist, The Mirror, The Guardian, Vogue, GQ and Harpers have signed a deal with Facebook for their content to feature in the tab.
Facebook News is a tab within the platform that showcases licensed content, will roll out in January next year in the UK. Facebook curates and personalises stories in Facebook News for users, selecting original and authoritative reporting, according to the firm report.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s News tab officially launched in the US earlier this year. The company says that 95 percent of the traffic publishers have gained through the service has been from new audiences. In August, the firm reported that it was considering expanding the service to more countries including the UK, Germany, France, India, and Brazil in the next six months.
In addition, Facebook reported it’s extending its Community News Project, which has funded the training of 80 journalists over the past two years. The program will be extended for a year at a cost of $3 million, which could offer an additional year of training to just over half of the existing journalists on the scheme, as well as recruiting dozens of new reporters.
Later, the firm announced it would buy Kustomer, a startup that specializes in customer-service platforms and chatbots. The deal was valued at more than $1 billion. Meanwhile, Facebook made the deal to bolster efforts to monetize its messaging business, which is expanding to include customer-service products that help companies interact with people via chat apps, like WhatsApp and Messenger.
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