Is Facebook giving up on its dream? I don't think so, and it's not just because giving up all potential income is incredible. Instead, I think the answer to this question came from Zuckerberg during Facebook's Q1 2017 earnings call, when he answered a question about Facebook's new video tab: For the video tab, our product experience goal is to get people who want to watch a video,
or want to find out what's going on with their favorite show, or what's going on with a public figure they want to follow, to Facebook , here will show them all the content they are interested in. This is very different from the current intent of people landing on Facebook. Most of the time these days, people just have a few minutes of free time and they open up Facebook and see what's going on in the world (their friends, some sms marketing service news, etc.). This is very different from "Hey, I want to watch video content now." This is what I want to open with this Tab. My thinking at the time was that Facebook was actually building two video products: one for what people wanted to watch (actively) (Video Tab)
and one for what people would see (passive), Because this content is pushed in front of them (News Feed video). I think that's true, but the former will be easier to monetize: after all, people are more likely to put up with ads for the video they want to see than with ads for the video that's pushed in front of them. In fact, the latter can be so harmful that it reminds people to just close the app. So reducing the amount of time users watch videos that Facebook can never effectively monetize doesn't seem like a particularly big loss.