San Francisco: Threatened by the surge in TikTok user base, Meta is changing its focus from news to building a creator economy and has reportedly reallocated resources from Facebook News and newsletter platform Bulletin towards generating more video and entertainment content.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook executive Campbell Brown has told employees that the engineering and product teams at Facebook would, in future, spend less time on News and Bulletin to “heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy.”
A former journalist, Brown leads Facebook’s global media partnerships.
A Meta spokesperson was quoted as saying in the report, that came out on Tuesday, that the social network is always assessing where to allocate resources, and that its teams “remain committed to the success of creators, and are doing even more to ensure they can find audiences on Facebook and grow engaged communities there”.
The decision was made at the product level, not by the partnerships team, the report added.
Facebook News was launched in 2019 and paid publishers like The New York Times and The Washington Post to aggregate their content.
Facebook News is a curated selection of news stories that users can find as a tab on the mobile app or website, similar to the Facebook Watch tab for video.
Bulletin was unveiled in June 2021 which is a subscription platform aimed at supporting independent writers.
Reports say that kids and teenagers are watching an average of 91 minutes content on Chinese short-video platform TikTok daily compared to just 56 minutes on Google-owned YouTube globally, reflecting the change in content usage.
The TikTok threat to Google’s business is not just limited to YouTube, but core Google services, including Search and Maps, are also being impacted by a growing preference for social media and videos, according to a Google executive.
Meta has already warned employees to expect a tough second half of the year as the tech giant continues to weather challenges related to its core online advertising business amid a weakening economy.
Meta chief product officer Chris Cox reiterated statements made by CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg during a recent quarterly earnings call with analysts.
The Meta executive added that the company is in “serious times here and the headwinds are fierce”, underscoring that its challenges aren’t likely to vanish anytime soon.
