By Minal BopaiahIn a move that seems to be both defensive and offensive, Facebook announced that it will be featuring more “quality” news that sends traffic to digital publishers’ websites.With Twitter’s IPO on the minds of many, particularly media professionals, Facebook seems to be looking to remind us all that it’s the Big Guy in the social media space with more than 1 billion users. Just this week, Facebook announced that traffic to media sites from Facebook has tripled int he past year.In addition, Facebook is changing how news stories are going to be featured. For one, mobile user would get more news stories. News stories would also resurface if they are commented upon, and Facebook would begin featuring news stories related to each other.

Facebook seems to be tacitly admitting that featured posts are not hugely popular with audiences. Moreover, the content recommendation aspect of this new format will probably lend itself to a more profitable revenue stream, namely a recommendation engine that publishers pay to get on, looking to link to stories on similar topics.Companies like Taboola and Outbrain have already seen major buy-in with their recommendation engines from online publishers, and since word-of-mouth marketing is gold for news sites, Facebook is the ideal platform to capitalize on the success of recommendation engines. Also, Facebook’s aging population (the majority of users are now in their 30s) is not as likely to be as interested in the silly memes and satirical stories that  they loved five years ago.For paid content sites, this is good news overall. Metered sites will have no trouble getting fed into news feeds, especially if they whitelist Facebook to allow any traffic from the site to view content without counting it against a monthly allotment. Hard paywalled sites will still have a harder time as paywalled content is not shared as much, but freemium sites that publish certain types of content outside their paywalls should also be able to capitalize on this new technology.