Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake

Until 2023, Facebook won’t take any cut of newsletter revenues; compared with Substack’s 10 percent cut, and Twitter’s 5 percent cut, Bulletin looks quite generous — particularly to people making six figures or more on their newsletters. But any student of recent media history knows that Facebook has a habit of changing the terms on its publishing ... See more

Most every article I read last week noted Bulletin’s email portability. But an important piece of fine print mostly got left out of the narrative: at launch, and maybe for a long time, Bulletin subscribers are only able to make purchases using Facebook’s own payment platform, Facebook Pay. And should you leave Bulletin, you can’t export those custo... See more

This differs from, for example Substack, which hosts Platformer (see disclosure). Substack allows writers to export both their email lists and their payment relationships, which are handled by Stripe. Anyone who leaves Substack can restart on another platform without having to ask their entire customer base to sign up again with a new credit card. ... See more