Twitter has acquired Dutch email newsletter service Revue, marking the tech giant’s first footsteps into newsletters and a part of Twitter’s effort to compete with rival social media companies.
Revue is a Dutch company founded in 2015 and currently comprises of no less than six employees. It has raised around $3,18,000 to date. The startup allows users to publish and monetize email newsletters, and thus Twitter has welcomed all creators, including experts, journalists, publishers, curators, and others, to join the platform.
The social media company has ambitious plans for the future – the creation of new features for writers to connect with audiences more easily. It will allow people to sign up for newsletters from people they follow on Twitter and develop new ways to support writers.
Twitter revealed that Revue will continue to operate as an independent and stand-alone service, remaining “focused on improving the ways that authors create their newspapers, build their audience and improve their work.” However it will eventually be integrated into the platform to “work seamlessly within Twitter,” revealed Twitter’s Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour and VP of Publisher Products Mike Park. The Revue team will, in time, be responsible for the building of more “discovery, reading, and conversational experiences” centered around long-form content on Twitter,” they added.
The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Though, it is known that Revue takes a cut of 6% of paid newsletter revenues as part of its transaction fee. However, Twitter has revealed it will lower that cut to 5%.
Writers, Twitter revealed, will be paid based on how many Twitter users they convert to subscribers. The writers “are a valuable part of the conversation and it’s critical we offer new ways for them to create and share their content, and importantly, help them grow and better connect with their audience. Twitter is uniquely positioned to help organizations and writers grow their readership faster and at a much larger scale than anywhere else. Our goal is to make it easy for them to connect with their subscribers, while also helping readers better discover writers and their content,” said Beykpour and Park.
The acquisition of Revue comes amid increasing pressure on Twitter to develop alternative revenue sources apart from advertisements. Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey revealed in July that Twitter was exploring and evaluating alternative revenue streams. Acquiring Revue turned out to be Twitter’s first venture into subscription revenue.
Revue is not the first start-up Twitter has acquired in recent times. It also bought social video company Squad in December 2020 and social broadcasting service Breaker this month. The company also showed interest in purchasing newsletter company Substack, which happens to be a rival of Revue, but a deal was never struck.
