Jessica Toonkel and Keach Hagey:
Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook is reallocating resources from its Facebook News tab and newsletter platform Bulletin, as the company focuses more on the creator economy, senior executive Campbell Brown told employees in a memo.
The decision was made at the product level, not by the partnerships team that Ms. Brown is a part of, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Facebook News is a curated selection of news stories that users can find as a tab on the mobile app or website, similar to the Facebook Watch tab for video. Bulletin, which Facebook unveiled in June 2021, is a subscription platform meant to compete with Substack. It is aimed at supporting independent writers.
There shouldn’t be much more to say than the old Lucy-pulling-the-football-on-Charlie-Brown GIF, which I seemingly use on a monthly basis to make the same point about Facebook. But apparently there is more to say, because publishers keep signing up for these whims! It’s not a “fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me” situation anymore. This has happened at least a dozen times. Probably more.
So much so that it’s so obviously predictable.
Publishers: when Facebook approaches you to sign on to a new service they’re launching to “help” you, do not sign up. At best, it will be a huge waste of time. At worst, it will actually damage your business.
We get it, Facebook is the largest platform in the world. It’s impossible to turn down the potential of four billion eyeballs (two billion users, give or take). But the reality is that it’s all just one large experiment. These offerings are the cheese and you’re the rat.
Anything that gets any level of buzz — not even always traction, just buzz — Facebook will chase. And when they inevitably can’t catch what made the thing they’re chasing interesting, they quickly and suddenly pull up. I mean, Bulletin is just a year old. Good grief.
