Sources: Facebook has been telling news publishers that it will only renew about a third of the existing news shows that it has funded for Facebook Watch
Facebook is showing a greater willingness to ax news programming that's not working on Facebook Watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's news-show spending on Watch has been on a shortening leash for two years: sources said back in early 2017 that publishers expected their paid livestreaming deals not to be renewed as the company pushed them toward longer-form content, and by late 2018 funding for digital publishers' shows was drying up as Watch pivoted to sports and big-name creators.
The cull now reported is the mechanism behind that drift — and it lands just before Facebook launched a funding program pairing publishers with creators starting with BuzzFeed and Condé Nast, suggesting the money isn't disappearing so much as being re-routed to formats it thinks travel better.
First-order effects
- Roughly two-thirds of the publishers whose news shows Facebook funded for Watch face losing that guaranteed revenue, forcing immediate decisions about whether to keep producing at their own cost.
Second-order effects
- Publishers dropped from renewal become candidates for the newer publisher-plus-creator pairing program, trading standalone show budgets for co-produced formats where Facebook shares rather than owns the risk.
- Each round of non-renewals reinforces the lesson of the earlier livestreaming deals: platform-funded video is a trial, not a business line, so publishers discount future Facebook money when planning newsroom video investment.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's news video strategy converges on paying a shrinking minority of partners — consistent with reports it planned to pay only about a quarter of the 200 publishers featured in its news tab — moving from broad original-content funding toward selective licensing and talk-show investment.
- Structurally, platform-funded journalism is settling into a cycle of fund-test-cull, which pushes news publishers back toward owned distribution and makes Facebook's payments a bonus rather than a planning assumption.
The trend: Platform-funded news video is being winnowed from broad experimental grants to a small set of selectively paid, format-tested partnerships.