US publishers have been notified by Meta that they would not be paid for their highlighted material on Facebook’s News page. After the program has been tested for approximately three years, a choice is reached.
A few years back, Facebook introduced the News Tab with the intention of transforming this social network into a hub for users to gather news. Facebook initially began paying US publishers for placing their news on the News Tab before changing its name to Meta. As a result of the program’s unsatisfactory performance, Meta is now ending the agreement and has ceased paying US publishers.
According to the Axios report, Meta gave about $105 million to US publishers in three years. Additionally, the business spent $90 million on news videos. Large chunks of this money were taken by the large US publishers. For instance, the New York Times received $20 million while the Wall Street Journal received $10 million. CNN received $3 million as well.
Advertisement The funded news push was an experiment that eventually failed, a source told the Wall Street Journal. This article claims that large corporations like Meta are unwilling to collaborate with publishers because of the regulations requiring them to pay for news.
META cancels the agreement with US publishers. Since we inked agreements three years ago to explore bringing more news links to Facebook News in the US, a lot has changed. According to an unnamed Facebook spokesperson who spoke to Axios, the majority of users do not use Facebook for news, thus it does not make commercial sense to overinvest in areas that do not correspond with user choice.
Meta is not the only business that must compensate news publishers. Additionally, Google pays some local and international media for using their content. Of course, there haven’t always been good vibes between Big Tech and publishers.
Advertisement The French Competition Authority fined Google 500 million euros last year for failing to pay publishers. Due to this, Google agreed to a deal with more than 300 publishers throughout the EU to use their news.
