The Wall Street Journal and parent company News Corp is holding talks with Facebook to offer its articles via a subscription model on the social networking platform, reports Bloomberg. However, it's not clear what the subscription model will look like: if all WSJ articles will be made available, or will it be restricted to special packages for business news, sports news, etc. The subscription model, if it materializes, will be great news for not just publishers, who are struggling to get a bite of the online advertising pie dominated by Google and Facebook, but also for Facebook's content hosting and monetization platform Instant Articles. Then there is the matter of Facebook's expected stagnation in ad growth by mid-2017, as confirmed by CFO David Wehner who said that Facebook has maxed out how many ads it can squeeze into people’s news feeds. Which is why Facebook is now looking to aggressively push ads on its other properties and monetize them instead. Mobile ad revenue accounted for 85% of Facebook's total ad revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2017. Unlike The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and BBC News among others, The Wall Street Journal only offered a limited number of articles for Facebook's Instant Articles platform, when it was launched in May 2015, and didn't sign up for Facebook's live videos platform either. Publishers' experience of Instant Articles has demonstrated that it doesn't really create an additional source of revenue, and neither does it not take away audience from a publisher.…
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