For a long time, news agencies in Europe pressured Facebook to pay for information published on the platform. Now, Meta’s social network decided not to continue launching them, but it will bet directly on the short videos in that tab.
This week, Meta announced that it plans to remove News Feed from Facebook, as “part of an ongoing effort to to better align our investments with our products and services that people value most.
According to the company, the news they make up less than 3% of what people see in their feeds.
The removal will happen in early December and will only cover countries like United Kingdom, France and Germany. This is expected to be expanded later.
Previously, the measure was taken in Canada, when the government passed the Online News Act, which requires technology companies to pay content fees to news outlets.
The concern of the experts points to the increase in misinformation on the social network.
The new challenge of the Mark Zuckerberg network will be in the formats of short videos, reinforcing Reels, a product similar to TikTok.
The most recent data, from last July, estimate that the Reels they get 200 billion daily visits on Facebook on Instagram. In October 2022 they reached 140 billion daily visits.
Justin Osofsky, Meta’s head of online sales, operations and partnerships, explained that the rapid growth of Reels has been driven by the format advertising infrastructure, in addition to recommendation algorithms.
“We may show Reels that we think (the user) is interested in based on our discovery engines,” Osofsky said. in an interview with Reuters.
It was something that Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, was already anticipating: “I think Instagram it will become (a network of) video over time. We see this even if we don’t change anything.”