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Business Insider spoke with multiple former executives and employees at the company and with others close to the operation. They described a more complicated story of poor leadership decisions that seemed to stem from an unblinking faith in just that one platform, Facebook, and just one product, video, while the once booming media market turned sour. This Facebook-heavy vision was enabled by growth-thirsty investors.
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In other news:
AT&T has lofty ambitions to change the way TV advertising is sold, but ad buyers worry it will become a walled garden like Facebook and Google. They also say that it's unclear how much AT&T is willing to work with competitors in 2019 to create standards in the ad industry.
Facebook Watch announced its video platform has more than 400 million monthly users. The company determines a daily active visitor as someone who's watched one minute of content, but the seconds don't need to be consecutive, Axios reported.
Speaking of Facebook, the platform will cut funding for some news shows on Watch. Facebook has also encouraged some media companies to shorten episodes of their news programs, The Information reported.
Get ready for more M&A in 2019, impacting telco and media. The next wave of M&A will focus squarely on mid-sized digital companies, analysts and investment banking experts told Business Insider.