Meta to no longer fund its news publishers in US: Report

Tech giant Meta has started informing its news partners that the company will stop paying publishers for their content to run on Facebook's News Tab in the US.

According to Axios, as the company is moving forward with sweeping changes to the Facebook experience, news has become less of a priority.

Meta's VP of media partnerships, Campbell Brown, told staffers the company was shifting resources away from its news products to support more creative initiatives, citing sources.

Facebook brokered a slew of three-year deals with publishers in 2019. At the time, the company was ramping up its investment in news and hired journalists to help direct publisher traffic to its new tab for news.

The deals were worth roughly $105 million in the US.

In addition to that, the company spent around $90 million on news videos for the company's video tab called "Watch", citing sources, the report said.

"A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the US. Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that do not align with user preferences," a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying.

The $105 million spent on additional news content for the News Tab was for incremental links.

News companies could still publish content to the Facebook platform at will.

Although hundreds of news publishers are still eligible to have their content included in the News Tab, the funding to roughly 50 publishers for their content will not be renewed.