Facebook spent millions of dollars annually in compensation for US publishing (from the NY Times to CNN). Meta canceled the program.
Meta is also forced to carry out a spending review. And among the items of expenditure sacrificed also the payments paid to US publishers jump. Facebook will no longer compensate publishers for content published in the News Tab section (unpublished in Italy).
Most people do not connect to Facebook to access the news, it no longer made sense for us to over-invest in an area that is not in line with the properties of our users.
explained a spokesperson for Meta.
Facebook, on average, spent $ 105 million annually. 20 million went to the NY Times , another 10 to the Wall Street Journal and, finally, 3 million went to CNN . Facebook made deals with publishers in 2019. At the time, it also hired a small team of reporters to curate Facebook’s news section.
Similar deals had also been made in the UK – with The Guardian and The Economist – while in Australia, after a long tug-of-war with the government and publishers, Facebook struck a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
For the first time in its history, Meta reported a drop in revenues : during the second quarter of 2022 the giant recorded revenues of 28.8 billion dollars, slightly down on an annual basis. Profits also fell, standing at 6.7 billion dollars. If the first is a figure that is only marginally subdued – it is -1% on an annual basis -, the second announces a catastrophe: it is 36% less than a year ago.