Bulletin, Facebook’s newsletter platform, has now launched in beta

Facebook seems to make an effort to put its hands into every popular idea possible. From audio chat rooms to gaming, if something is popular, you can bet someone on Facebook is working on a competing project.

This time, it’s newsletters. Announced today and revealed by TechCrunch, Facebook is slowly releasing Bulletin, a newsletter-like service that looks to compete with the likes of Substack. Currently, it’s in beta and has a small number of creators on the platform.

A lot of the details about the platform are still not available, but TechCrunch notes that the platform’s FAQ says Bulletin will “enable creators to grow their audience in ways that are not exclusively dependent on the Facebook platform.”

Bulletin articles and podcasts (both free and paid) will be available through creators’ pages on Bulletin, as well as on users’ Facebook News Feed.

That means you don’t have to have a Facebook account to subscribe to a newsletter, but a lot of the infrastructure is based on Facebook, including Facebook Pay, which is how people can subscribe to premium newsletters.

In the FAQ, Facebook notes it is currently focused on US creators, but it is launching worldwide with plans to add more international creators.

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