Facebook puts news on the back burner as it continues to push video and creators

Sharanya Sinha
Sharanya Sinha July 20, 2022
Updated 2022/08/05 at 12:56 PM

Facebook is only 18 years old. But with user numbers dwindling and Gen Z eating TikTok’s lunch, it feels like a midlife crisis. In response, the company is trying to add more video content from creators to users’ feeds and is now moving resources away from text-based products like its news tab and newsletter site. As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook exec Campbell Brown told employees about this change in priorities in a recent memo. Brown said engineering and product teams at Meta-owned Facebook would, in future, spend less time on News and Bulletin to “heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy.”FACEBOOK WANTS ITS FEED TO LOOK MORE LIKE TIKTOK.

This change in priority was independently confirmed by The Verge, while a spokesperson for Meta told the WSJ that the company is always assessing where to allocate resources, and that its teams “remain committed to the success of creators, and are doing, even more, to ensure they can find audiences on Facebook and grow engaged communities there.”Facebook launched News in 2019, paying organizations like The New York Times and Washington Post to aggregate their content. The newspaper combines human-generated stories with algorithmic recommendations, and contracts with news organizations are worth millions of dollars. Facebook is said not to be very interested in renewing these contracts, although the company has not made any official statements on the matter. Facebook Bulletin, meanwhile, launched last year as a competitor to news company Sub stock, which has attracted big names such as best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell to its publications.

But since then, the product hasn’t made much of a splash, with Facebook emphasizing slow, “meaningful” growth instead. In a blog post last year, the company provided one of the few hard numbers on newsletter size: “half of the newsletter creators have more than 1,000 free email subscribers, many have more than 5,000 or 10,000” — numbers to consider. The enormous size of FacebookNews of the change in focus should come as no surprise. In June, The Verge reported on the changes Facebook plans to make to its core algorithm. It simplifies TikTok users by focusing on visual content from creators instead of updates from friends. In a video-heavy world, it makes sense that newsletters and news usually go together.

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