Facebook could soon be the front page of your personal newspaper

Social networking website Facebook is reportedly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies such as BuzzFeed, The NewYork Times and National Geographic to convince them to host their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site. Through this third-party format, consuming news digitally will not only become faster but will also allow publishers to feature targeted marketing alongside their content. Currently, scrolling through a Facebook newsfeed is not only time-consuming but also distracting, with so many  posts vying for attention.  More often than not, we tend to gloss over them, especially when browsing on mobile, since the 3G connection is rather patchy to open them up all together. According to the New York Times, the tweaks that Facebook is proposing will see the company directly hosting content. The report added that Facebook is planning on testing the new format in the next several months. [caption id=“attachment_2012129” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] With this new plan, Facebook may share ad revenue that runs alongside the content with publishers. “Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter,” the NYT report said. The idea seems similar to what Twitter offers since the links tapped on Twitter’s mobile application open in the application itself rather than opening as a link in a new browser. The NYT article further noted that Facebook will remove the usual ads of a publication when the content is hosted on the social network and will allow to show a single ad in a custom format within each Facebook article. Moreover, publishers will lose out on important reader data such as the number of times they visit the website, their behavioral pattern in consuming news etc to Facebook.