Report: Facebook's Podcast Interest Fading

Last April, during a hot market for audio, Facebook launched Live Audio Rooms, short-form stories called Soundbites and podcasts for U.S. users. The company signed deals with creators and sponsored one of the industry’s biggest U.S. conferences: Podcast Movement. Facebook product managers even appeared on the long-time industry program “New Media Show” to encourage podcasters to join the platform.

But nowadays, according to Bloomberg, the company is emphasizing other initiatives in conversations with podcast partners, including events in the metaverse and online shopping, according to industry executives who work with the platform. They asked not to be identified because their discussions with Facebook haven’t been disclosed publicly.

Facebook’s waning interest in podcasting is a disappointment for some in the growing industry because the scale of its platform offers a large potential audience, and with it, the possibility of more advertising revenue. Instead, parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is turning its attention to the metaverse and short-video projects amid increasing competition and a precipitous drop in its stock price.

A spokesperson for Facebook said the company is still working on podcasts even as it’s accelerating work on priority features like Reels and Feed. The company is seeing good engagement for its audio products, according to the spokesperson, who declined to provide specifics.

Facebook’s move into audio, in some ways, felt inevitable. It did so during a moment of audio mania last year, when the live audio platform Clubhouse was valued at $4 billion and every tech company wanted to copy its product. Spotify Technology SA had a market value of more than $50 billion a year ago, double what it is now, and Amazon.com Inc. was signing major audio deals. So when Facebook said it was introducing audio experiences, no one was entirely surprised.

But even Facebook’s limited podcasting efforts have been a source of growth for some content providers. TYT Network, which produces political programming, said Facebook is its second-most-popular listening platform after Apple Podcasts. The network added podcast content to Facebook in September and since then, the platform has contributed “hundreds of thousands of additional monthly listens,” according to Chief Marketing Officer Praveen Singh.