Metas retreat from news accelerated in 2023, leaving publishers scrambling for traffic
Summary
In September, Meta said it would "deprecate" its Facebook news tab in European countries including the U.K., France and Germany as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most." "At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments that executives at Facebook and Meta made that they have just decided that news is more trouble than its worth and that they will show people a fairly minimal amount of it," Bauerlein said in an interview. An analysis of 1,930 news and media websites from over 370 companies conducted by the analytics firm Chartbeat for CNBC revealed that Facebook accounted for 33% of those publishers overall social traffic, measured by page views, as of December, down from 50% a year earlier. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told analysts on his companys earnings call in August that hes "laser-focused" on a new strategy involving the use of artificial intelligence to help generate content in addition to relying more on creators. Longtime media columnist Mathew Ingram, a chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, said Facebook was "never a good place" for news, because it "focused on emotion and sharing for other purposes" rather than on seeking the truth.