Facebook Watch Isn’t Living Up to Its Name

Three long years ago, when the world knew little about Cambridge Analytica and laughed off the specter of fake news, Mark Zuckerberg had a very different kind of problem. Facebook wasn't adding many more users in key ad markets, so it needed to figure out how to wring more money from its existing audience. Although the company accounted for an impressive 45 minutes of its average user’s day, that wasn’t in chunks big enough to send them the ever-growing number of ads at the heart of the company’s business model. The average Facebook session lasted less than 90 seconds, according to people familiar with the matter—while you were waiting in a checkout line, trying to avoid eye contact between subway stops, or sitting on the toilet. Zuckerberg and other executives decided to try to boost that number by pushing their way into a much older kind of advertising model: TV. Like a lot of things at Facebook these days, it’s not going great.

You’re probably not watching much Facebook Watch. The company committed about $1 billion last year to buying shows for its streaming video tab, reasoning that even a single hit could leach a significant piece of the average two hours Americans spend in front of the TV, or the Facebook-level amount of time they spend on Google’s YouTube. It hasn’t produced a hit like the Netflixes, Amazon Primes, and Hulus of the world. So far, some of its biggest names have been network castoffs (MTV’s Loosely Exactly Nicole) and refugees from other streaming services (Comcast Watchable’s I Want My Phone Back). When Facebook reports its quarterly earnings on Jan. 30, investors and analysts will mostly be listening for news about ad sales for its messaging apps and the stories feature it copied from Snapchat. (Bloomberg Media also produces a show, funded by Facebook, for the Watch platform.)