Elain Brown Tech 07.29.2022 02:Jul AM EDT

Meta Will No Longer Pay for Aggregated Content for Facebook's News Tab

Meta is shifting focus and saying goodbye to the contents of the News tab.

Facebook's parent company, Meta, is telling publishers it no longer plans to pay for the content it has been aggregating in the news tab.

Meta has been shifting focus not just to Instagram but also to Facebook.

For a long time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that by the end of 2023, he intends to more than double the quantity of information from suggested accounts that people see when using Instagram and Facebook.

And it looks like the news section feature of Facebook is also affected by this change.

The firm is moving forward with significant changes to the way users interact with Facebook, and as a result, the news feed has become less of a focus.

Meta Is Pulling Back Focus on Facebook's News Tab

Meta has begun informing its news partners in the United States that the company will no longer pay publishers for their news articles to run on Facebook's News Tab. This communication has begun in the United States.

Campbell Brown, Vice President of Media Partnerships at Meta, communicated to the workforce that the company was reallocating resources away from its news offerings in order to promote more creative endeavors.

According to The Verge, Meta invested approximately $105 million on three-year news content purchases, plus another $90 million on news videos.

It was reported that the social media company invested in the Wall Street Journal for $10 million, while it spent $20 million on the New York Times.

For $3 million, Meta also arranged an exclusive partnership with CNN that involves access to news that is locked behind its paywall.

One of the suspected hurdles that led to this drawback is increasing regulations that Facebook and other tech companies need to pay for news that they make available on their platform.

Additionally, the business stated that the funded news push was an experiment that, in the end, did not yield any favorable results.

According to Axios, a spokesperson from Facebook stated, "a lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. 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 preference."

Meta's Shift on Facebook

Meta's decision to pull back news on Facebook does not mean that news articles will no longer be available on the platform.

There are restrictions placed on the ability of news organizations to publish content on Facebook. Publishing companies can still post news if they want to.

It is just that the funding for the content of approximately fifty news publishers will not be renewed.

According to Axios, Facebook has gone back and forth over the years on the function that news should play on its platform. However, this time, they are bidding it farewell for good.

Furthermore, just recently, along with this shift of focus on news. Meta rolled out new features on Facebook, curating it to be a platform that gives its users the best of both worlds.

Facebook just recently announced the new Home tab and Feeds tab. The Home tab will serve as a "suggested for you" page. It will be the place to discover entertainment from new creators that Facebook will recommend using its algorithm.

On the other hand, the Feeds tab will be the place where users will be able to catch up on content from their friends, family, and creators and pages they follow.