Why Facebook drops the race with Spotify and closes the podcasts

4 May 20222 years ago babelfish

Facebook will close its podcast platform less than a year after its launch. Facts and insights

Facebook abandons the sound contest: the social network will close its podcast platform less than a year after its launch.

The company (owned by Meta) will no longer allow people to add podcasts starting this week and will remove them completely on June 3.

The move, confirmed to Bloomberg , is part of a broader reassessment of Facebook's audio products. The company is also shutting down the site's Soundbites and Audio hubs (Soundbites is a kind of audio-based TikTok). It will also integrate its Live Audio Rooms feature for live streaming (essentially a clone of the Clubhouse audio app) into its larger Facebook Live suite.

The move will help Meta "focus on the most significant experiences," according to the company spokesperson.

After a year of experimentation, the company has apparently come to a conclusion: it's not really worth it to reach out to the likes of Apple and Spotify.

All the details.

ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT APPLE AND SPOTIFY

As Blooomberg points out, the podcast market has gotten crowded in recent years. Podcast app operators like Apple and Spotify were already big threats and the latter has both successful licensed shows and acquired companies.At the end of 2020, the giant Amazon purchased the Wondery podcast network and also a hosting platform. The Clubhouse live audio platform was valued at around $ 4 billion last year, and every tech company wanted to copy their product.

And Facebook was no exception. Last year the platform attempted to emulate Clubhouse by launching Live Audio Rooms, the live voice rooms .

But just a year later, the platform and its parent company Meta lost interest in podcasts and are heading in a different direction. According to Engadget , "there was no guarantee that Facebook would stand out in this market, even with a well-known name and huge resources at its disposal."

BETTER FOCUS ON THE METAVERSE

There has been a good response to audio services, a spokesperson for Meta told Bloomberg in mid-April, but the social media company was more interested in highlighting the metaverse and shopping. In other words, Meta's interests in conquering AR, VR and rivals like TikTok may have diverted its attention from audio.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/perche-facebook-molla-la-gara-con-spotify-e-chiude-i-podcast/ on Tue, 03 May 2022 18:41:26 +0000.