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It’s been a long time since Facebook has been the general go-to place for accessing news and to see what’s happening in the world. General news has been always available to the public free of cost. However, that is about to change as Facebook has decided to launch a subscription service for news stories. The feature will reach its testing phase in October 2017. In this way, there will be a limited access to free news and users will have to pay in order to access it further. However, this will be applicable only for news outlets that decide to charge their readers.

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Yahoo finance’s say on the matter

According to Yahoo Finance, it believes that Facebook has opted for this feature in order to make more money out of its services. Newscasters will then show only 10 free news stories per month after which subscription charges will kick in.

Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said,

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

Facebook has been discovering different ways to increase its revenue to achieve greater heights. Recently, Facebook launched the Instant Article service. It allowed publishers from all over the world to deliver articles directly to Facebook. However, the idea was not supported by publishers and it got some bad reviews too. Moreover, the networking king has also started to test a new feature which shows ads in between videos. In the future, this feature will be rolled out to everyone. As a result, the ad-free experience we all have while watching Facebook videos won’t be there anymore.

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All of these changes haven’t been officially announced by Facebook and the public is still waiting for it. However, Facebook made it loud and clear that it will guarantee that the publishers will have full access over their subscriber data.