Meta will stop paying US publishers for their material to appear in the News tab on Facebook
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The News Tab experiment that Facebook started a few years ago doesn't seem to be a large part of that, as you've surely heard, as Facebook and Instagram will heavily favor AI-curated creator content moving forward. Axios claimed that Facebook's parent company, Meta, is informing publishers that it will no longer be paying for the content that it has been compiling for the news tab, confirming earlier rumors. In three-year content deals for news, Meta reportedly spent about $105 million (plus an additional $90 million for news videos). This includes $10 million for the Wall Street Journal, $20 million for the New York Times, and $3 million for CNN. The Wall Street Journal cited a source today who claimed that the paid news push was an "experiment that ultimately didn't pay off" and that the growing regulation compelling Facebook and other internet firms to pay for news was the cause of the company's dwindling excitement.
The whole initiative follows experiments that came and went in the previous few years, such as podcasts, the Novi cryptocurrency, the "Campus" revival of traditional Facebook, and the HouseParty clone Bonfire. The news page itself will stay, and you can read more about how it functions right here. "A lot has changed since we inked arrangements three years ago to explore adding additional news connections to Facebook News in the U.S.," a Facebook spokesperson who declined to be named told Axios.
The majority of Facebook users do not utilize it for news, so it is not profitable for businesses to heavily invest in these areas. Although the definition of user preference can vary depending on who you ask, it doesn't seem like Facebook's paid aggregation push in the News tab since it launched in 2019 has had a significant impact. This is evidenced by the response to Instagram's attempt at a TikTok impression and its shocking retreat.
In 2019, when Facebook unveiled the News tab, it touted the potential of a section with daily top stories "chosen by a team of journalists" that could avoid the pitfalls of other News Feed adventures that occasionally promoted fake news, the Instant Articles that publishers didn't like, or its infamous "pivot to video." It was simply another area of Facebook that I had previously visited and had never returned to.
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