Twitter has acquired Revue – a startup that allows users to publish and monetize newsletters. The announcement was officially made by Mike Park – Twitter’s Vice President of Product – on his Twitter account.
We are thrilled to announce @Revue is joining Twitter! Revue makes it easy for writers and publishers to send editorial newsletters and generate subscription revenue. See and blog post below for more.https://t.co/3XTrlHYa2B
— Mike Park (@mep) January 26, 2021
In its blog, Twitter shares its reasoning behind the acquisition:
“With a robust community of writers and readers, Twitter is uniquely positioned to help organizations and writers grow their readership faster and at a much larger scale than anywhere else. Many established writers and publishers have built their brand on Twitter, amassing an audience that’s hungry for the next article or perspective they Tweet. Our goal is to make it easy for them to connect with their subscribers, while also helping readers better discover writers and their content. We’re imagining a lot of ways to do this, from allowing people to sign up for newsletters from their favorite follows on Twitter, to new settings for writers to host conversations with their subscribers. It will all work seamlessly within Twitter”.
In terms of monetization, Twitter is committed to using Revue to help writers “grow their paid subscribers while also incentivizing them to produce engaging and relevant content that drives conversations on Twitter”.
It is clear that Twitter wants to position itself as the go-to place for writers to create and monetize newsletters. However – it’s not the only competitor in the space. According to an article in the Washington Post, many reporters are using Substack to publish and monetize newsletters after the news industry job market shrunk due to Covid-19. Substack has also been continuously releasing competitive features – such as an update to their subscriber dashboard a few days ago:
We've just released an updated version of our subscriber dashboard, which you can use to:
* Understand your subscribers' behavior
* Create filtered lists
* Send emails to a subset of your listhttps://t.co/q8ZT2KypzQ— Substack (@SubstackInc) February 18, 2021
To remain competitive with Substack, Twitter has announced that Revue’s Pro features will be free for all Twitter users and that they have lowered their paid newsletter fee to 5%.
We will have to wait and see if Twitter’s acquisition of Revue will help them dominate this space.