Around a month after Facebook acquired the Bulletin.com domain name, the social media giant has launched its new service, aptly named Bulletin.
The service, described as a Substack competitor, offers a newsletter service through which writers and content creators can publish free and paid newsletters that can be posted online or sent to a subscriber’s inbox.
Currently in beta, Facebook Bulletin has partnered with a number of notable writers and content creators including author Malcolm Gladwell and sportscaster Erin Andrews.
From a domain name perspective, Facebook’s recent purchase of Bulletin.com has been key to the company’s launch of its new service, with the whole project hosted at Bulletin.com rather than within the Facebook.com ecosystem.
Bulletin.com’s role in the project goes further than simply hosting a pretty website. Each newsletter creator gets their own Bulletin.com subdomain. Malcolm Gladwell’s, for example, is https://malcolmgladwell.bulletin.com/.
The company was rumored to have paid over $6 million to acquire Bulletin.com via Facebook’s IP attorney, Hogan Lovells. Although this figure hasn’t been verified, Facebook isn’t afraid to pay for domain names it wants. In 2010 for example, the company paid $8.5 million to acquire FB.com.