Twitter Acquires Newsletter Startup to Expand Business

Twitter Inc.’s acquisition spree continues with the purchase of Revue, a newsletter platform. Revue helps anyone start publishing on the internet and create an email-based following via newsletters that can be monetized, like Substack.

Revue is part of the company’s plan to expand its business, which is heavily reinforced by advertising – accounting for 85 percent of its revenue.

The company didn’t disclose any financial details of the transaction. Whatever the case, the Dutch startup raised 400,000 euros in December 2016, according to Crunchbase.

Revue will help Twitter provide an easy way for writers, publishers, and experts to connect with their following.  Furthermore, Revue will also help readers easily discover writers and their content.

“Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience – whether it’s through the one, they built at a publication, their website, on Twitter, or elsewhere,” the company said in a blog post.

The company plans to do this in different ways and will make it work seamlessly within the social media platform and, at the same time, stay as a standalone service.

“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,” the company says.

“It will all work seamlessly within Twitter.”

Twitter will help users monetize their content by creating a “durable” incentive model. The model will in part motivate writers and publishers to produce more content through paid newsletters.

After Revue’s acquisition, Twitter has opened up Pro features that had to be previously paid for by users. According to the company, the Pro features will be free for all.

Newsletter subscription fees have also been slashed – to 5 percent – letting writers keep more of the revenue to themselves. The massive commission cut is part of the company’s incentives to stay competitive in the booming paid newsletter market.

In addition to Substack, dozens of other newsletter platforms exist. Few examples include Buttondown, TinyLetter, MailerLite, HubSpot, and many others.

The company has plans to continue making Revue better and, as a result, will retain the current team and hire more people in critical roles across engineering, design, research, and data science.

“Over time, this team will build more discovery, reading, and conversational experiences centered around long-form content on Twitter.”

Twitter Inc.’s latest acquisition follows three other recent ones. Twitter has acquired Squad, a social video sharing app, Breaker, a podcasting company, and Ueno, a design firm, since December 2020.

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