The push, which Zuckerberg calls building the “Discovery Engine,” is a radical departure from Facebook and Instagram’s historical focus on showing posts from a user’s social graph, or list of friends.

He said that such recommendations currently account for roughly 15 percent of the content on Facebook, and that the percentage is already higher on Instagram. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will more than double the amount of content from recommended accounts people see while using Instagram and Facebook by the end of 2023. What's next: As Meta shifts its focus to short-form video, other investments in projects such as audio are being sunsetted.If you already have strong feelings about your Instagram feed increasingly showing Reels from accounts you don’t follow, just wait until next year.

Earlier this year, Canada said it would force Facebook and rival Google to pay for news content.

Facebook launched a news fund for content in Australia last year, after a lengthy debate with regulators over funding content.

Last year, Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said fewer than one in every 25 posts in the News Feed contained links to a news story.īetween the lines: The regulatory pressure that prompted some of these news deals continues around the globe.

Before the introduction of the News Tab in 2019, the company had made a decision to change its algorithm to prioritize content from friends over brands, including publishers.

The big picture: Facebook has gone back and forth about the role news should play on its platform for years, which sometimes frustrated news partners. In some cases, the partnerships also unlocked paywalled content.

Meta spent more than $10 million on its news partnership with the Wall Street Journal, more than $3 million on its deal with CNN, and more than $20 million on its partnership with the New York Times, sources told Axios.

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.

News companies could still publish content to the Facebook platform at will. 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 preferences,' a Facebook spokesperson told Axios.īe smart: The $105 million spent on additional news content for the News Tab was for incremental links. What they're saying: 'A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. In addition to that, the company spent around $90 million on news videos for the company's video tab called 'Watch.'

The deals were worth roughly $105 million in the U.S., sources told Axios.

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.

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, the Wall Street Journal reported.Ĭatch up quick: Facebook brokered a slew of three-year deals with publishers in 2019.

Why it matters: As the company moves forward with sweeping changes to the Facebook experience, news has become less of a priority. that the company no longer plans to pay publishers for their content to run on Facebook's News Tab, sources tell Axios.

Meta on Tuesday began telling its news partners in the U.S.

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