1. Facebook Launches Its Substack Competitor Newsletter Platform Bulletin
- Yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of its latest product, an email newsletter platform, called Facebook Bulletin with a number of big-name writers and newsletters such as Malcolm Gladwell and Marginal Revolution by Economist Tylor Cohen and Alex Tabarrok.
- Email newsletter has become a hot trend in tech over the past few years, thanks to Substack and Facebook naturally with almost 3 billion users across its platform sees it as too big an opportunity to miss.
- Bulletin, however, is not hosted within Facebook like many other recent Facebook product initiatives. Instead, Bulletin remains a standalone platform for free and paid newsletters that will compete with other similar services in the segment such as Substack, the leader in the vertical, and Twitter, which bought Revue recently.
- Facebook said that it would not take a cut of Bulletin creators' revenue at launch and that creators could choose their own subscription prices. This puts pressure on the Substack which takes a 10% cut from writers revenue and has a uniform subscription pricing model.
- The platform is in beta and the company said it is not open to new creators as yet.
Facebook advantage and challenges
- Facebook is the largest social media on earth with almost 3 billion users. The platform has a wide-range of user engagement platforms that it plans to connect with Bulletin. Writers will be able to integrate Facebook pages and groups and other Facebook distribution tools to reach an audience. Facebook plans to use this as an advantage to attract potential writers. This does offer competitive advantage to Facebook since Substack does not have anything similar.
- At the same time, Facebook has been into a long range of controversies over the past years. The company uses various moderation policies on its main platform which can be a potential deterrent for writers to join Bulletin.
Meta trend: Creator economy has been gaining momentum of late. The rise of independent creators using digital platforms has given rise to a new generation of platforms enabling creators to manage their operations and services. The newsletter is one of the sub-trends in the vertical. Read our report on the creator economy here.
2. Robi’s Subsidiary Company RedDot Digital To Create Alternative Investment Fund r-Ventures Private Equity Fund, Partners with SBK Tech Ventures, Green Delta Insurance, IDLC, and Acnabean
RedDot Digital, a Subsidiary of Robi Axiata Ltd announced that it is going to launch an alternative investment fund called “r-Venture Private Equity Fund” to invest in digital startups in Bangladesh. The company has signed partnership agreements with several technology and financial companies in the market including SBK Tech Ventures, Green Delta Insurance, IDLC, and Acnabean for the fund.
Robi launched R-ventures — 12-month incubation support — in 2018 as an incubator program for its employees. A year later the company launched a 2.0 version of the program opening it up for the general digital startups.
