Facebook soon to roll out paid news subscription product

A week after nearly 2,000 publishers in the US formed the News Media Alliance to get an anti-trust exemption from the Congress to negotiate over advertising revenue with digital platforms, a top Facebook executive has confirmed the company would soon launch a news subscription product.

Campbell Brown, the head of the company's news partnerships, said Facebook will launch a subscription-based news product with initial tests beginning in October, The Street reported late on Tuesday.

"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. "And that is something we're doing now. We are launching a subscription product," he told the gathering. According to Brown, the paywall idea is based on premium and metered plans and has been in the works for a while.