Facebook is shutting down its podcast platform.
According to Bloomberg, Facebook will remove podcasts from its service starting June 3. The company will shut down the ability for users to add podcasts as early as this week.
If the question you have right now is “wait, Facebook had podcasts?” we hear you, and that’s probably why the service is shutting down. Facebook added podcasts to its site while the market was hot (perhaps too hot), in April last year. You may remember the news of Spotify paying a massive amount of money to Joe Rogan to switch to their podcast platform in May 2020, and Amazon acquiring podcast platform Wondery in December 2020.
Facebook confirmed the news to Bloomberg, though it wouldn’t say when, exactly, the podcasts were being shut down. As for Audio Rooms, which is a related feature that let users launch audio chats, it will be integrated into Facebook Live, which will simply display an option to go live with video and audio, or audio only.
Soundbites, which allows users to share short audio messages, is also being shut down.
Facebook and its parent company Meta seem much more interested in immersive experiences and video than audio formats right now. The company has recently launched Reels, a short video format previously available on Instagram, globally on Facebook, promoting it strongly inside the app.