NBC News planning online streaming service this year to attract younger viewers; company says it has no plans to bring any of its content back to Facebook
calling it ‘Fakebook’ — while heaping praise on Snap See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
NBC has been building its youth audience on Snapchat rather than Facebook for two years: the Olympics highlights deal in 2016 led into Stay Tuned, its twice-daily Snapchat news show, and this year NBC became the launch partner for Snapchat's tool that pipes live broadcast snippets straight into the app.
The Facebook side of the relationship was already decaying — publishers had concluded it was unlikely Facebook would renew paid livestreaming deals as it pushed them toward longer content. Declaring 'Fakebook' and ruling out a content return makes the break explicit, and the plan lands: NBC later ships the service as NBC News Now.
First-order effects
- NBC News redirects distribution spend from Facebook to an owned streaming destination plus Snapchat, where it already holds the anchor news slot via Stay Tuned and the live-broadcast tooling partnership.
- Facebook loses a marquee TV-news brand from its video ecosystem at the same moment publishers were already questioning whether paid news deals there would be renewed.
Second-order effects
- Snapchat gains a differentiated news lineup against Facebook's video push just as Facebook's own Watch product is pivoting to older audiences because teens are tuning out — leaving each platform with the demographic the other is shedding.
- Other networks face a forced choice between accepting Facebook's terms for longer-form content or following NBC's route of building owned streaming destinations, which raises the price of exclusive news licensing across platforms.
Third-order effects
- If NBC's bet pays off, the structural pattern is news brands treating social platforms as acquisition channels rather than homes — with revenue and viewer relationships migrating to owned apps, and platform-paid news deals becoming a shrinking, secondary line item.
The trend: TV news brands are pulling their content out of Facebook and consolidating youth distribution around owned streaming services plus Snapchat, reversing the platform-first era of news deals.