Facebook has announced to invest an additional $4.5 million towards helping the news industry globally. The social media giant, that reported more than $5 billion in profit in the second quarter this year, said it will give $3.5 million towards "Facebook Membership Accelerator", a three-month pilot programme designed to help news organisations with membership models.

"We are going to continue to coach the group of metro news publishers from the pilot programme through the end of this year, and we will reconvene with them in 2019 to focus on subscriber retention," Campbell Brown, Global Head of News at Facebook, said in a blog post on Thursday.