Facebook is out of the podcasting business after only a year
Last year, Facebook announced it wasintroducing a couple of new audio formats, including podcasts, and the features began rolling out to U.S. users in June. However, despite all the hype surrounding the company’s foray into a particularly booming space at the time, things quickly took a U-turn with reports emerging last month thatthe Meta-owned social media site was dialing back interest. A new report is confirming previous suspicions that the company is giving up on podcasts and that they’ll be removed from the platform starting next month.
Facebook notified creators that they will lose the ability to add podcasts to the service as soon as June 3, according toBloomberg. Eventually, the platform will remove its short audio content creation tool called Soundbites and its central audio hub.
The company says it is making this move as part of efforts to focus on other experiences — a notion that jives with last month’s report talking about those very experiences including online shopping, metaverse events, and short video projects over audio. The company reportedly won’t do the dirty work of telling users about the demise of its podcasts, leaving it up to partners to decide how they’ll inform listeners.
While the company’s killing off podcasts and Soundbites, it’ll integrate Live Audio Rooms (for hostingClubhouse-like chats) into Facebook Live, allowing users to decide whether to go live with just audio or streaming video, too.
April last year was notable for the audio market. Clubhouse was valued at $4 billion, Spotify had a valuation of over $50 billion, and even Amazon was signing major audio deals. It was no surprise that Meta wanted a piece of the pie as it signed deals with creators and sponsored 2021’s August Podcast Movement.
The company quickly realized, though, that pretty much everyone had locked in their preferred way to access podcasts. It was even more telling when Facebook didn’t sponsor the March 2022 Podcast Movement event nor did it send a single representative and it didn’t renew contracts with its starting roster of Live Audio Rooms partners.
So it goes for Facebook podcasts.
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