CNN Ends Distribution Deal With Facebook Watch, Brings ‘Go There’ Series In-House

Go There, CNN’s daily live news series that ran on Facecbook Watch for a year and a half, is going somewhere else.

Beginning today, the series will live on CNN’s owned-and-operated platforms, Variety reports. At the same time, CNN is ending its partnership with Facebook Watch to distribute original programming — though it will continue to operate its popular page on the social network, which counts 34 million followers.

While Facebook Watch previously funded Go There and controlled its ad inventory, CNN is now taking ad sales in-house. Under the earlier deal, CNN could air Go There on its own platforms 24 hours after bowing on Facebook Watch. CNN digital productions SVP Courtney Coupe told Variety that Facebook Watch served as an incubator for Go There, and the company always intended to move the series to its own platforms.

CNN similarly introduced another original series titled Anderson Cooper: Full Circle on Facebook Watch in 2018 as a companion to Cooper’s TV series, and then brought the digital series in-house in 2019.

Go There is a single-topic daily news show featuring over 120 contributors and correspondents covering topics including climate, race, identity, women’s issues, and immigration. Roughly 600 episodes have aired to date on Facebook Watch, and the series even produced one of Facebook’s most-viewed videos ever — a Jan. 2020 report from Wuhan, China about the COVID-19 outbreak, which has clocked 210 million views and counting.

“News in Watch is about investing in partners like CNN, helping them test and learn what works long-term for audiences both on Facebook and beyond,” Shelley Venus, Facebook’s director of news strategy, told Variety in a statement. “CNN has once again demonstrated that they can build shows that perform well on mobile and continue to expand them on their own platforms.”