Following up on the recent acquisition of newsletter making startup Revue, Twitter has started working on publishing newsletters right from its platform. Earlier this month, Twitter had acquired the Dutch email newsletter service, and now, some users have been able to sign up for the publishing tool. However, according to TechCrunch, the company has reverted Revue’s offer back to private beta at the moment, which means users who have not yet signed up will have to wait longer for the feature.
Nonetheless, if you are one of the lucky few who was able to sign up for the feature, you will still be able to use it.
Newsletters are a form of email-based updates by organizations on their company’s news and other topics of interest. Why then would Twitter – a short form, character limited platform- be interested in the same? It is being estimated that when the newsletter platform would be finally launched, the value of tweets would inflate, with writers using this limited space to gain subscribers. The subscribers would then be able to read the whole content in the newsletter format- something which the 240 characters of tweet prevented.
The feature will soon be added to the Menu bar of Twitter and would be accessible by clicking on the ‘More’ option. Writers would be able to draft their newsletter and attach or drag recent tweets to it if they wish to. Currently, users can manually add the email addresses of the subscribers or import a list of the same from a CSV file or from Mailchimp. It also lets users pre-schedule the newsletter delivery. All these features, however, were already part of Revue when it was a stand-alone start-up, and as of now no new features can be seen after Twitter acquired it.
Twitter also advertised that writers and publishers can also earn from paid subscribers, apart from getting exposure. As reported earlier, Twitter itself will earn a 5% cut from said subscribers. This is part of Twitter expanding its modes of revenue from ads to other features.
Clearly, Twitter does not think that the feature is ready to release to the wider public right now. Its short time launch might have been a tester – to see the popularity and efficiency – but was quickly withdrawn. Whether the mission is an abort or will be relaunched again is yet to be revealed.
