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After Europe, Facebook News is shutting down in the US and Australia. Starting in April, the News tab will no longer be available in these markets. Meta says this change is part of its ongoing effort to better align its investments. The company plans to focus on products and services that its users value the most.
Facebook News is shutting down in the US and Australia
Facebook News is a dedicated section for news within Facebook. Launched in the US in October 2019, the social media behemoth paid publishers to show their news stories. It signed multi-million-dollar deals with major media houses to bring the latest news from all industries directly to the app. Things got off to a great start and Meta (still called Facebook back then) expanded news to other regions.
It arrived in the UK in August 2020 before gradually making its way to other European countries, including France and Germany. Facebook News also arrived in Australia. However, the hype was short-lived, likely because very few people used Facebook as their primary source of news. As such, Meta decided to discontinue News. The section was pulled down in the aforementioned three European markets last December.
Now, Meta has announced that it will deprecate Facebook News in the US and Australia. The deprecation will begin in “early April.” The company will honor existing agreements with publishes until they expire. The section will slowly disappear from the app once all agreements expire. You can still see news and news links posted directly on the feed of a Facebook account, be it a publisher or an individual.
According to Meta, “news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed.” The company made the same statement last September when it announced the deprecation of Facebook News in the UK, France, and Germany. It appears the situation hasn’t improved. “The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the US has dropped by over 80% last year,” Meta said in its official press release.
Meta is done with news content and news-related products in these countries
With Facebook News shutting down, Meta’s experiment with news content and news-related products is coming to an end, at least in these five countries. It no longer plans to sign “new commercial deals for traditional news content.” The company will also no longer develop “Facebook products specifically for news publishers.” The social media giant says it will invest more in products and services that drive user engagement.
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