Facebook is due to launch a subscription-based news product, it has been reported.

The social media giant’s news partnerships head Campbell Brown announced the plans at a conference in New York.

The feature is likely to allow publishers to create a paywall on Facebook’s Instant Articles and guide readers to a publisher’s home page to opt for a digital subscription, according to a TheStreet report.

The idea for a paywall is based on premium and metered plans and has been in the works for a while, TheStreet said, citing comments by Ms Brown at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit.

The company is widely seen as a threat to publishers as it hoovers up digital advertising revenue.

The Instant Articles scheme was launched in May 2015 as a way for publishers to have their articles read inside the Facebook app.

But after the initial fanfare, many publishers are believed to have abandoned the platform after tests showed that it did not improve their traffic anymore than traditionally social media links and they found the monetisation element “lacking”, Digiday reported.

Facebook has quietly introduced a new feature, and it makes online stalking a slightly riskier affair.

Facebook Hello is essentially Poke under a new name, but its placement on people’s profile pages is proving problematic.

You might not have noticed it yet, as it only started rolling out this summer and appears to still be in a testing phase.