Twitter has announced their latest acquisition, Revue, a service that helps anyone create and get paid for their newsletters.
Although Revue will stay as a standalone service, their integration will make it easier for audiences and authors to find each other, while helping Twitter become a better home for writers.
Twitter is known for being a space where people gain followers through sharing short snippets of their thoughts on the platform. Authors, thought leaders, businesses, and more use Twitter every day to connect with their audiences and build loyal followings. Many have formed such strong bonds with their communities that they are now turning to other places where they can publish longer content, beyond the 280 character limit, in order to satisfy their audience.
The bigger idea behind the acquisition is to help the two platforms drive more conversation on both of them simultaneously. Enabling users to subscribe to the newsletters of their favorite authors directly through Twitter will enable writers to direct them to their longer, private content, while the discussion over the premium content will flow back to Twitter.
“We imagine a number of integrations on Twitter that will help readers more easily discover and connect with writers — from easy ways to subscribe to a newsletter to new settings for writers to host conversations with subscribers.”
Among the changes is making Revue Pro features free to all users. In addition to removing the paywall on features, Twitter has lowered Revue newsletter fee to 5% to better compete with its competitors. Lower fee will return the favor by helping writers gain larger profits from their subscribers.
In the marketing world, this is a great opportunity for thought leaders and brands with large Twitter followings to get into the inbox of their most loyal followers.
The integration puts Twitter head-to-head with Substack, a rival service of Revue. Substack has been gaining more popularity recently and added a reader feature for their own in December. Twitter taking Revue under its wing and providing its users a lower fee will certainly stark up the competition.
Twitter has already started hiring more people to team Revue. The goal is to hire more engineers, designers, researchers and data scientists to take the platform to the next level. In return, the developments will create “conversational experiences centered around long-form content on Twitter”.
