As Expected, Facebook Is No Longer Interested In Paying News Orgs To Post News On Facebook That No One Wants

Just a few weeks we noted that this was inevitable, but Facebook has now made it official that it's no longer interested in dumping money on news publishers.

A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. 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,"

This should not be a surprise. For many years now, news publishers who refused to adapt to the changing times and changing news ecosystem blamed Facebook for their own failures to adapt, and then started demanding that Facebook (and Google) just give them money. We warned, repeatedly, that this was a dangerous game that wouldn't end well,

And, yet, all we've heard for years from many in the news world is that Facebook and Google needed to pay journalism organizations. Indeed, Rupert Murdoch got so focused on this that he convinced Australia to force those companies to pay - and the idea is being proposed in many other places as well.

And, so, now Facebook is realizing that news on its platform is much more of a nice to have" rather than a need to have."

Still, I guess a few giant orgs made out nicely for a few years while Facebook was effectively paying them off:

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. In some cases, the partnerships also unlocked paywalled content.