Tech giant Meta has reportedly started informing its news partners in the US that the company will stop paying publishers for their content to run on Facebook’s News Tab.
According to US new site Axios, as the company moves forward with big changes to the Facebook experience, news has apparently become far less of a priority.
Insiders have revealed that Meta’s VP of media partnerships, Campbell Brown, had reportedly told staff that the company was shifting resources away from its news products to support more “creative initiatives”.
Back in 2019, Facebook brokered a slew of three-year deals with publishers as it ramped up its investment in news and even hired journalists to help direct publisher traffic to its new tab for news.
The deals were set to have cost Zuckerberg a cool $US105 million ($A153 million) and included $US10 million ($A14.4 million) for the Wall Street Journal, $US20 million ($A29 million) for the New York Times, and $US3 million ($A4.3 million) for CNN.
Meta also spent $US90 million ($A130 million) on news videos for the company’s video tab called “Watch”, citing sources, the report said.
A Facebook spokesperson is being quoted by Axios as having said: “A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the US. Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn’t make sense to over-invest in areas that do not align with user preferences.”
When Facebook first introduced the News tab back in 2019, it promoted the potential of a section with daily top stories “chosen by a team of journalists” that could avoid the pitfalls of other news deed adventures that sometimes boosted fake news, the Instant Articles that publishers didn’t appreciate, or its infamous “pivot to video”.
