Meta Platforms will no longer pay US news organisations to have their material appear in Facebook’s News Tab as it reallocates resources in the face of economic downturn and changing user behaviour.
The company said on Thursday most people “do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business, it doesn’t make sense to over invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences”.
Meta, then called Facebook, launched the partnerships in 2019. The “News Tab” section in the Facebook mobile app only displays headlines from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, NBC, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.
The company did not say how much it was paying the news organisations, but reports put it as millions of dollars for large outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal.
The Associated Press did not participate in the initiative.
At the time the program launched, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he saw “an opportunity to set up new long-term, stable financial relationships with publishers”.
But Meta, which is based in Menlo Park, California, said in a statement a “lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the US.” On Wednesday, Meta Platforms Inc posted its first revenue decline in its history and forecast weak results for the current quarter as well.
Meta does not pay for news content that outlets post on its platform. The News Tab deals, the company said, were for “incremental content, ensuring that we had access to more of their article links and that we were including a range of topic areas at launch.” The company said Facebook News will continue in the other countries its currently in, and the shift in the US won’t change the deals in the UK, France, Germany and Australia.
Published on
July 29, 2022
