Facebook To Host News Directly On Its Site?

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) has been "quietly" holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content directly on Facebook's platform than force users to click on an external link to access the content, the New York Times reported on Monday night.

Facebook is in a position of power with a global network of 1.4 billion users, but would require a "leap of faith" for news organizations who are used to keeping their audience base within their own ecosystem.

Facebook has been trying to alleviate these fears and intends to being testing a new format in the next several months, according to NYT who is expected to be an initial partner along with BuzzFeed and National Geographic. Naturally, Facebook has also discussed ways for publishers to monetize its content from advertising that would run side by side an article.

The social media company believes that hosting content improves the user experience, especially on mobile devices where opening a new browser page can take up to eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks this is too much time as it wants to deliver content to users in milliseconds, rather than seconds.

Shares of Facebook closed Monday at $84.43, and were up about 0.4 percent in the premarket.