It's no secret that the internet has really disrupted the news business model.
And I just think that every internet platform has the responsibility to try to help fund and form partnerships to support news.
Now, the thing that's been really challenging, that that has made this take longer than I think either of us would have would have wanted.
Is that we've had this funny dynamic in our community where, you know, people come to Facebook in our services because it's a social network.
They want to stay connected with their friends and their family and communities.
And we get consistent feedback from the vast majority of people on our services that they want to see more content from friends and family and less other stuff.
So it's created the solid dynamic where on the one hand we personally and kind of the values of our company we really value journalism.
Certainly we've had a lot of conversations with folks who have pushed us quite hard to kind of show more of the content to enter into relationships or we can fund more of the content creation.
But it just was this kind of odd dilemma where while we wanted to do that, we were just getting consistent feedback from our community that they generally want to see more from friends and family and less of other stuff.
So that kind of created an odd dynamic to then be setting up a relationship we'd be going Paying for content that people were saying that they actually wanted to see something else instead.
So the thing that's changed in the last few years is that we've gotten these secondary tabs to work, right?
So for the longest time, news feed was basically synonymous with Facebook, that's kind of what the experience was.
And I wasn't sure if we're gonna be able to build other tabs or other experiences within the app that could get meaningful engagement.
And what we found now is in we've built the marketplace tabs that people can go and buy and sell things.
So we built the watch tab so people could watch videos and it took a little while to get these things off the ground.
In the beginning it wasn't clear that they were gonna be Successful.
And still today, the majority of people don't use them.
But what we found is that even if 10 or 20% of people in our community, really want a dedicated experience in an area that can still be something that 10s of millions of people in the US, use and hundreds of millions of people around the world.
And that certainly can be quite meaningful and worth doing so and that's what we've been working on basically is is working on a a dedicated tab for journalism high quality journalism in Facebook and it is gonna be the first time ever that there is a dedicated space in the app that's.
Focused on high quality journalism in order to help curate the the top things that are n there.
We're not only doing it algorithmically.
We're also we've put together a team of folks who have experience in journalism and a background in this.
So I don't think it's something that can just be done by computers.
Of course, we have personalization as well in there.
But at least for the top stuff, and that's going to be done by people with a background in the space.
Provenance, which I'm sure we'll get to, is just an incredibly important thing that you've pushed me on for a while.
And then of course, on a financial basis.
This is gonna be the first time that we're forming long term, stable relationships and partnerships with a lot of publishers and I know we've done a lot of Experiments and try different things in the past and, and I know frankly that that's also created a lot of thrash in the ecosystem when, you know we tried something and it didn't end up working out the way we wanted.
That's one of the reasons I wanted to wait until we could prove that we could get these other tabs to work before trying to do this in news because I wanted to make sure that this could be a.
A positive experience and one we could commit to for the long-term.
So now for the first time were making multiyear financial commitments and hopefully helping to make a kind of long term sustainable business model in a way that we can be in business together..
So that's kind of been the journey that we've been on, I'm really excited about this.
