The logos of Facebook and Google apps are displayed on a tablet.
Denis Charlet | AFP via Getty Images
LONDON – Facebook has announced that it will launch its Facebook News product in the UK on Tuesday, paying publishers for their content.
Facebook News is a dedicated section of the Facebook app that contains compiled and personalized news from hundreds of national, local and lifestyle publications.
The product, which competes with Apple News, was launched in the US last June and the United Kingdom is the second country to access it.
Facebook claims that the product provides ‘informative, reliable and relevant news’ to users, while also emphasizing original and authoritative reporting on urgent topics. ‘
Jesper Doub, the European director of news partnerships at Facebook, said in a blog post on Tuesday: “This is the start of a series of international investments in news.”
He added: “The product is a multi-year investment that brings original journalism to new audiences, and also provides more advertising and subscriber opportunities to build sustainable businesses for the future.”
Facebook announced the UK launch of Facebook News in November, saying it would include content from media partners, including Conde Nast, Hearst, The Economist and Guardian Media Group.
On Tuesday, Facebook said it had now reported Channel 4 News, Daily Mail Group, DC Thomson, Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group.
Some content that is usually behind a pay wall can be viewed for free on Facebook News, which is expected to be launched in more countries this year.
“We will continue to learn, listen and improve Facebook News as it unfolds in the UK and other markets, including France and Germany, where we are actively negotiating with partners,” Doub said.
Technical giants like Facebook and Google are under increasing pressure to pay media companies for their content.
A Facebook spokesman told CNBC that the company would pay certain UK publications to display their content in Facebook News, but he could not disclose how much.
“We will pay some publishers to participate in Facebook News,” he said. “We pay for content that is not yet on the platform, to achieve a diverse range of coverage across a variety of topics.”
He added: “The monetary earnings for the majority of publishers that appear in Facebook News will be similar to monetization via other Facebook tabs, from referral traffic to your sites or ads in instant articles, which will push people to hit a paywall.”
Google’s battle
Last week, Google signed an agreement to pay French publishing companies and news agencies for their content.
The agreement comes after several months of talks between Google France and the media groups, represented by the French Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale lobby.
Google has said it will negotiate individual licenses with alliance members related to rights and access to a new mobile service from the company called News Showcase.
The search giant said last year that it would pay news publishers for the first time, a change from the internet giant that for years did not want to. The company has agreed to a series of initial transactions in Germany, Australia and Brazil, and now appears to be expanding to France.
But when the Australian government proposed a new law that would force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for the right to link to their content, Google threatened to take its widely used search engine out of the country.
“Together with the unmanageable financial and operational risk that this version of the Code would become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” said Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, told a Senate committee last week.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a news conference “we are not responding to threats”.
– Additional reporting by CNBC’s Ryan Browne.