Bad news for news publishers in USA as meta stops paying for its news tab
Meta recently updated and told publishers that it has planned to stop paying for the content it has been aggregating in the news tab. Facebook and Instagram will soon depend heavily on AI-curated creator content and move ahead. The News Tab project in Facebook that was launched few years back won’t be a part of this. Axios reported this information recently and following a set of rumours, Meta confirmed it themselves.
Meta spent about $105 million in three-year content deals in the news section. It also invented a$90 million for news videos. This budget even includes investment for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and CNN. Wall Street Journal asserted that the paid news push experiment ultimately didn’t pay off. It previously reported that the rise of regulation that forced Facebook and other internet giants to pay for news caused the company’s waning enthusiasm.
It was noticed that users don’t mostly come to Facebook for news. Facebook officials reported that a lot has changed in three years since they made deals to bring news link in Facebook. Thus over investment in areas that didn’t align with user preference wasn’t fruitful.
However users embraced Instagram’s attempt at a TikTok impression in a different way. This proved that the definition of user preference can vary depending on users to users. However, in the case of paid push news in Facebook didn’t justify it.
