A new blog post has emerged from Facebook now called Meta, this post marks the six-month anniversary of its newsletter publishing platform, Bulletin. The company has also just revealed the number of its publications as 115 and is hoping to sustain the competition with companies like Substack and Twitter.
Unlike Substack, which happens to be the buzziest newsletter platform you can find around, for now, one can’t just start writing with Bulletin. Meta is found it more pleasing to add writers to the publishing platform in batches rather than having some sort of public sign-up process. While this process has proven that the company isn’t doing much to push up the numbers of writers on its publishing platform within the shortest time possible, again that does appear to be on purpose at least to some extent (there’s always the possibility it hasn’t been as successful at courting writers as it planned). Of course, it no brainer that Meta can possibly get as many writers as desired by simply allowing anyone to sign up as writers or creators, but for now the company’s stance still remains to “thoughtfully increase the number of creators” over the next year.
Recently in November, Substack in an announcement revealed that its writers had netted about a million paid subscribers. Meta has only given numbers of free subscribers, saying “more than half of the creators on Bulletin have over 1,000 free email subscribers, with many having more than 5,000 or 10,000.” Even if most Bulletin publishers are closer to the 10,000 sides, it doesn’t look like Substack can be termed competition anytime soon. This may likely come as a sign of relief to Substack’s co-founder, who took to the platform and made a post welcoming the competition when Twitter acquired a competitor Revue and rumours were making rounds about Meta getting into the newsletter space.
While it probably appears a little too early to underrate Meta’s Bulletin over how its infant days in the newsletter space is going, Meta doesn’t seem to be recording the same amount of success it has had with other clones. Its Snapchat like stories feature has gone ahead to be a massive part of its photo and video sharing social platform – Instagram. Meta also remains one of the numerous companies trying to prove that the social audio platform- Clubhouse is more of a feature than an entire platform it has presented itself as. With Meta’s involvement with cloned versions of known technologies, there may be less baggage — writers may find it hard trusting a platform that has imprints of Facebook now called Meta, as its past efforts to work with creators and journalists have yielded much success.
Olagoke Ajibola is a creative writer and content producer with an eye for details and excellence. He has a demonstrated history of telling stories for TV, Film and Online. Aside from being fascinated by the power of imagination, his other interest are travel, sport, reading and meeting people.
