Facebook to erect paywall over Instant Articles

Facebook is to begin trials of a subscription-based model for its news aggregation service, Instant Articles, it has been reported.

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, said the platform will launch a paywall model in October, according to a report in The Street.

The news comes after publishers in the US, included the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, asked Congress for an anti-trust exemption to negotiate collectively with both Facebook and Google, who have been hoovering up publisher ad revenues while failing to contribute to the costs of producing original content.

Publishers said they want to secure the long-term availability of local journalism by securing a fair share of revenue and data, subscription models and protection for publishers’ intellectual property.

The Street said that Facebook now plans to steer readers to a publisher’s home page to consider taking out a digital subscription, and will install a paywall which would require readers to become subscribers of the platform after they’d accessed 10 free articles.

“One of the things we heard in our initial meetings from many newspapers and digital publishers is that ‘we want a subscription product – we want to be able to see a paywall in Facebook,'” Brown said at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, in New York City on July 18.

“And that is something we’re doing now. We are launching a subscription product.”