By Adedapo Adesanya
Social media platform, Twitter, has acquired Revue, a newsletter platform for writers and publishers.
This deal marks Twitter’s foray into building out long-form content experiences on Twitter and could also mean a look into subscription revenue.
According to reports, Twitter did not break the bank to acquire Revue, a five-year-old Dutch company.
Revue has six employees and has raised only around $318,000 and with the acquisition, Twitter will be procuring the team and plans to expand it once onboard. This means Revue will remain an independent brand within Twitter as the platform will continue to invest as a standalone service.
Revue offers free and paid newsletter options. The free version lets writers send newsletters to up to 50 people. The paid version lets them email up to 40,000 people.
Revue takes a 6 per cent cut of paid newsletter revenues as a part of its transaction fee. Twitter says it will be lowering that cut to 5 per cent and will allow all creators to join the platform, including experts, curators, journalists, publishers and more.
It plans to create new features that will make it easier for writers to connect with their audiences, including allowing people to sign up for newsletters from people they follow on Twitter and adding new settings for writers to host conversations with their subscribers on Twitter.
Moving forward, Twitter will supercharge Revue’s offering by helping writers grow their paid subscriber lists.
Twitter says writers can expect some sort of paid compensation based on how many Twitter users they convert to subscribers.
The company says it will continue to develop new ways to support writers, perhaps with other revenue streams down the line.
In 2016, Twitter stopped including photos and links in its character count. In 2017 it expanded its character count from 140 to 280 maximum characters per tweet in 2017.
Also that year, it created “Threads,” a feature that lets users string together tweets more easily in order to communicate longer messages.
