Facebook wants to be part of the newsletter business and is willing to pay for it. Axios reports today that the company will soon begin testing its newsletter product, which will be integrated into Pages. As part of that test, Facebook will also judge the writers, some of whom the company will pay.
Axios does not name any editor and says that the product itself does not yet have a name, but also informs that the initial user group will be composed of small, independent editors. This newsletter tool will also help copywriters create a website outside of Facebook. The idea is that writers can charge for subscriptions to their work and potentially create additional sources of revenue, while relying on Facebook to engage their community. Facebook will allow them to create groups for their work as well, and will also provide metrics in their newsletters.
Facebook’s momentum comes at a time when the newsletters business is gaining significant momentum across the industry. Substack, most notably, paid advances to several writers to bring them to its platform. The VergeCasey Newton, a former Silicon Valley editor, now publishes his Platformer newsletter through Substack.
Seeing the success that writers are having on the platform, Twitter acquired the Revue newsletter platform in January in an attempt to keep them in the Twitter ecosystem. The difference between the efforts of Twitter and Substack and Facebook is that Twitter has not yet specifically sought out writers to pay. This could suggest an editorial bias, although Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie sees them as “business decisions, not editorials”.
Facebook, which already receives criticism from liberals and conservatives in the United States for the way it moderates its platform, may face an adverse reaction to its newsletter product, mainly depending on the writers it seeks for the program.