Meta will stop paying US publishers to put their content in Facebook’s News tab

Image: Facebook

The News Tab project that Facebook launched a few years ago doesn't seem to be a big part of the future of the platform. Facebook's parent company Meta is telling publishers it no longer plans to pay for the content it has been aggregated into.

According to the report, Meta spent about $105 million in three years for news, including $10 million for the Wall Street Journal, $20 million for the New York Times, and $3 million for CNN. A source today said that the paid news push was an experiment that didn't pay off, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The News tab will remain, and you can read about how it works here, but the overall initiative follows a number of projects that have come and gone in the last few years.

A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S., according to a statement from an unnamed Facebook spokesman.

The definition of user preference can vary depending on who you ask, but it certainly doesn't seem like there's been a huge impact from Facebook's paid aggregation push in the News.

Facebook talked about the potential of a section with daily top stories chosen by a team of journalists that could avoid the pitfalls of other News Feed adventures that sometimes boosted fake news. I visited it once and never went back to it.