Thursday, September 03, 2020

Plans to launch Facebook News internationally; other Facebook items

 

Several items of note to report involving Facebook.

• Facebook is accelerating its plans to expand Facebook News internationally. The company aims to launch Facebook News in multiple countries within the next six months to a year and is considering the U.K., Germany, France, India and Brazil. In each country, the company will pay news publishers to “ensure their content is available in the new product,” says Facebook.

• After Facebook raised concerns over lost ad revenue due to Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes, other digital publishers have chimed in. One publisher says ad rates on iOS could fall as much as 40%, The Wall Street Journal and 9to5mac reported.

• Facebook has introduced Facebook Shop, a new place to discover businesses and shop for products in the Facebook app, says Facebook. Facebook started testing this in the U.S. and launched a complementary shopping destination on Instagram in July, called Instagram Shop.

 • Facebook says Apple rejected its effort to tell people that Apple would take a 30% cut of sales in a new online events feature, Reuters reported. Apple made Facebook take that info off to get the tool to users, says Reuters.

Facebook also aimed to inform users on the Google Play store that Facebook wouldn’t take a fee for ticket sales, but that message was also not shown, says Reuters.

Apple is also in a high-profile corporate spat with Fortnite creator Epic Games, which is suing Apple.

• Facebook has a new account linking tool that provides a better experience for people on Facebook when they see and access content from publishers they subscribe to, says the company. Facebook is collaborating with publishers around the world to test this new product, which allows people to link their news subscription accounts on Facebook. Once implemented, linked subscribers will not meet paywalls when accessing articles from Facebook and won’t be asked to sign-in repeatedly, a common pain point many subscribers and publishers face today, says Facebook.

News and Tech

No comments:

Post a Comment

For now, we're opening this blog to Anonymous comments. This will continue as long as civility rules. Disagree as you may, just keep it clean and stay on topic. No profanity, and no name calling. We reserve the right to moderate such comments, though the person who made it may come back and reword their message in a more civil way.