Facebook officially announced, through the "voice" of the president Mark Zuckerberg, that it will ask users to pay to see certain posts from the social network. We are talking here about something that was announced a few weeks ago, when various sources within the Facebook company announced that this change was going to take place and of course many people were upset.
Facebook is making this change because it wants the Instant Article platform to be successful, and the content creators are not satisfied with the money they earn. Facebook created Instant Articles to allow the viewing of articles from online publications directly in its application, but much faster than normal, the content being loaded instantly inside the application after access.
Facebook has not been very successful in maintaining a high level of publishers' interest in Instant Articles due to the fact that they do not generate as much money as standard websites. In this idea, Facebook is now forced to resort to the introduction of subscriptions to be able to read certain posts of online publications, the method that will bring more money for them.
Facebook forces you to pay for posts
Facebook claims that it will let publishers process the payments made by users themselves, so it will not be an intermediary in this whole story. Basically, Facebook lets publishers do what they want within its platform, just to make sure that they don't pay more attention to AMP, the competing service created by Google to make the internet faster, which has similar problems with publishers.
Facebook will allow publishers to let users see certain posts per month for free, while for others they will have to pay various amounts of money. No one knows how much money the publishers will ask for, because Facebook will not have any control over this process, but it will probably be a few euros, or dollars, to cover the operating costs of the publishers.
"If people subscribe after seeing news stories on Facebook, the money will go directly to publishers who work hard to uncover the truth, and Facebook won't take a cut. We plan to start with a small group of US and European publishers later this year and we'll listen to their feedback."
Facebook has created a platform where everyone receives information for free, and asking users to pay could alienate a lot of people. The posts are successful because people have access to them and share them, but if Facebook blocks access and imposes the payment of a sum of money to be able to read the posts of online publications, then people could completely ignore them.
Facebook has not announced a date from which this change will be imposed, but it will initially start in the USA and other important countries, and in Romania it is hard to say if any online publication will impose this.