You may not remember, but the Facebook News tab was launched in 2019 thanks to agreements with the world’s leading newspapers worth many millions of dollars.
As The Verge recalls: Wall Street Journal made 10 million a year, New York Times reached 20, and CNN pocketed 3 million every 12 months. This April 2024 it will be gone forever.
Meta says it will “stop using” Facebook News in the US and Australia in April 2024, that it will not subscribe to new commercial agreements for news, and that it will “not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future”.
Goodbye to the press, goodbye to accurate information
This is not the first time that Facebook withdraws from the news world and it was already expected. In 2022, the focus shifted from news to creator economy, and former head of news partnerships Campbell Brown left the company last October.
When Facebook introduced Facebook News in 2019, the company said: “We hope this work helps in our effort to sustain great journalism and strengthen democracy,” and that a survey “found that we were underutilizing many topics that people wanted more of in their News Feeds, especially around categories like entertainment, health, business, and sports.”
Now, Meta has a different message, reiterating the statement that “news represents less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and it is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.”
Instead of paying publishers, Meta “will have to focus its time and resources on the things people tell us they want to see more on the platform, including short-format video.”
In addition, it encourages publishers to continue posting links on their own pages, using products like Reels and ads to drive people to their own websites, away from Facebook.
The end of Facebook’s licensing agreements is well-known news in the US, where it abandoned them two years ago, but in Australia it eliminates the 70 million dollars annually that it paid to media outlets such as Sky News Australia, News Corp, Seven, Nine, and The Guardian.
Facebook and Instagram blocked news in Canada last year due to a similar law.
