Meta Platforms said it will no longer pay news organizations in the United States to have their material appear in News Tab of Facebook as it reallocates the resources in the face of the economic downturn and change in user behaviour.
Meta said that most people in the United States does not come to Facebook for news, and being a business it does not make sense to invest in areas that do not align with preferences of the users.
Meta launched the partnerships in 2019. The News Tab section in Facebook mobile app that only displays headlines and nothing else from The Washington Post, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed News, NBC, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among others.
Meta did not say how much the company paid the news organizations, and the Associated Press did not participate in the initiative. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta, said he saw a clear opportunity to set up new, stable, and long-term financial relationships with the publishers.
But Meta said that a lot has changed since they have signed deals three years ago to test bringing the additional news links to Facebook News in the United States. Meta said, the company does not pay for news content that outlets post in its platform, and they had access to more of their article links and were including a range of the topic areas at launch.
