Sources: Facebook is aiming to launch a news section for its Watch platform this summer and is testing different video partnerships with roughly ten publishers
Facebook is getting ready to launch a news section for its Watch platform and it's testing different video partnerships with roughly 10 publishers, Axios has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
This March 2018 report is the first signal of what became Facebook's most sustained push into professionally produced news video: within months, the roughly ten publishers in testing hardened into a seven-organization lineup spanning ABC News, CNN, and Fox News, with shows going live on Watch from mid-July per the confirmed rollout schedule.
It also marks Facebook's second run at hosting publisher content inside its own surfaces, after the 2015 test format with the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic — and the arc continued into paid territory, with Facebook later offering millions of dollars to license news content for a dedicated news section.
First-order effects
- Roughly ten publishers gain an early-mover slot in Watch's news tests, shaping the format before Facebook commits to a public launch lineup.
- Facebook's video team gets a deadline-driven mandate: a summer news section means editorial partnerships must convert from experiments into scheduled programming.
Second-order effects
- Once Watch news shows launch, Facebook moves from free distribution toward paying publishers directly — the licensing-money approach that surfaced a year later — shifting bargaining power toward outlets with broadcast-grade production capacity like CNN and Fox News.
- Other video platforms competing for the same news partners face pressure to match Facebook's funded-partnership model rather than relying on ad-revenue splits alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — hosted publisher formats in 2015, funded Watch shows in 2018, content licensing by 2019 — news publishers become structurally dependent on platform payments for video economics, making each platform strategy pivot an existential revenue question for newsrooms.
- A platform-curated news tab concentrates gatekeeping over what counts as 'news' programming inside one company's interface, prefiguring the trust-and-curation debates that follow any such section at scale.
The trend: Social platforms are cycling through successive models of funding professional news video — distribution deals, co-produced shows, then outright content licensing — pulling publishers' economics deeper into platform-controlled formats.