Meta, which launched its newsletter publishing platform Bulletin in 2016, has just celebrated its six-month anniversary. In the same post, the company announced that it has over 120 publishers on its platform to help compete with companies like Substack and Twitter.
Unlike substack, As a consequence, Meta continues to put new writers on the platform in batches rather than announcing them publicly. This seems to be on purpose, as the goal seems to help the platform grow.
Substack announced in November that its writers had reached one million paid subscribers. Meta only gave figures for free subscribers, stating that “more than half of Bulletin creators have more than 1,000 subscribers, and many have more than 5,000 or 10,000.” On the other hand, a small cold war was seen when in February, when Twitter purchased competitor Revue and rumors spread that Facebook was getting into newsletters, Substack’s co-founder wrote a sarcastic blog post welcoming the competition.
It is possible to facilitate local news and provide an outlet for local news providers, who have been adversely affected by the COVID downturn. This is one of the most interesting use cases for the Bulletin platform. Meta marked the ways that local news providers utilize Bulletin’s engagement tools to maximize their connections with users, and Bulletin does provide a more equitable route for local journalists and updates, making it an essential tool for many users.
Instagram has incorporated Snapchat’s Stories feature into its Instagram product, and Meta is the only company attempting to prove that Clubhouse’s social audio platform is merely a feature.