Facebook to end payments to US news publishers

The decision affects deals worth over $100 million, according to a person familiar with the situation. Meta had signed up a host of publishers in recent years, including deals worth tens of millions of dollars with news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In June, the Journal reported that Meta was beginning to signal to publishers and others in the industry that renewing the deals wasn’t a priority. Earlier this month, the Journal reported that Facebook had reallocated resources from its News tab platform to focus more on the creator economy, citing an internal company memo. Axios reported earlier Meta’s decision not to renew payments.

“A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S.," said a Facebook spokeswoman. “Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t align with user preferences," she said.

The Facebook News tab will remain as a feature. While payments to U.S. publishers are being phased out, deals in countries such as the U.K., France, Germany and Australia will remain in place.

Meta posted its first-ever decline in quarterly sales this week. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been working urgently to revamp the tech giant’s operations, from the content that is presented to users, to how digital ads are delivered, to focusing more on video content.

Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News in 2019. At the time, publishers were growing increasingly frustrated that Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google were taking the lion’s share of the digital ad market.

The person familiar with the situation said Facebook viewed its foray into news as an experiment that ultimately didn’t pay off.

Facebook’s shift away from its paid news product was influenced by the stepping up of regulation around the world aiming to require technology platforms such as Facebook to pay for news, the Journal has reported.

Some news outlets had already planned their budgets for the coming year without including the fees, according to publishing executives.

Campbell Brown, a former journalist who leads Facebook’s global media partnerships, said in the internal memo earlier this month that the company would shift engineering and product support away from the news tab and its Bulletin newsletter platform as “those teams heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy."

Reallocating resources from News and Bulletin is part of a broader shift within the company toward the metaverse and short-form video content creators that can compete with ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok.

(Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com)