Facebook is reportedly pushing publishers to start publishing stories within Facebook’s mobile app. Subsequently, publishers would get a cut of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue, and in return their stories would live on Facebook — no longer on their own sites – reducing on load time for stories, while enhancing the reading experience.

This proposition offers an alluring escape to struggling publishers, whose ad rates have diminished as readers have gone mobile. The offer will enable the publishers to tap into Facebook’s booming mobile advertising business, which now accounts for 62% of its total revenue, according to a report on Digiday.

A Facebook rep was quoted in the report as saying, “We’re in the early stages of conversations with publishers to explore various content strategies but nothing has been established.”

Initially, publishers may see their mobile ad revenues increase, but there are concerns about what happens if (or when) Facebook decides its interests are no longer aligned with publishers’.

John Herrman, Co-editor of The Awl, told Digiday “I’m not sure they’re really aligned now,”. “But when the day comes that they’re even less aligned, Facebook won’t think twice about moving on.”

And moving on would mean the disappearance of that lucrative revenue stream.

“Publishers will continue to rely on Facebook for traffic because that’s where their readers are today,” Ryan McConville, SVP of publisher partnerships at mobile ad network Kargo, told Digiday. “But that doesn’t mean they also want to give Facebook power over their ad sales. They’d like to keep that separate.”

McConville added that outsourcing ad sales to Facebook would be unwise, as publishers are poised to see a mobile ad revenue lift once brand marketers embrace the medium. To date, most mobile ads have been performance marketing-based.

With the media and technology worlds merging and the rise of platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, publishers are left at the mercy of these online intermediaries to reach their audiences. And yet if a publisher is already dependent on Facebook for distribution, then formalizing and more directly monetizing that relationship would seem an easy, if not logical, next step.

In the report, publishers echoed the opinion that although Facebook is very important for their business from a distribution standpoint, but moving their content off to another site without a very clear value exchange would be very risky.  

Publishers also raised eyebrows at thought of turning Facebook into a content company instead of just a distributor, effectively turning them into their biggest competitors. If Facebook were to run a publishing monopoly, it could dictate ad revenue share terms and in that case the publishers could be left holding the short end of the stick.