Meta’s Copy-Acquire-Kill Strategy Fails, Again
Less than 18 months after launch, the company’s Substack clone is biting the bullet
When Meta launched its newsletter platform Bulletin in June 2021, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that it was directly competing with one other service: Substack.
It was visually similar.
It worked in a similar way.
It delivered similar content.
Meta even copied the strategy of paying high-profile authors to use the tool to drive up hype and interest. Of course, it was all wrapped up in a big shiny Facebook bow.
This wasn’t an imposter by mistake; it was an imposter by design.
And it was yet another example of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite business play — one that fails time and time again.
Copy, Acquire, Kill
Meta has been deploying the policy for years, going back to Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram. (It might even go back further, with Facebook itself being a copy of Myspace and Friendster).
In documents reviewed by an Antitrust panel who are investigating whether the takeover should have been allowed to happen, Zuckerberg suggested in emails that Instagram was a threat…
