Twitter is shutting down its newsletter tool Revue
Twitter announced on December 14, 2022, that they will discontinue their free newsletter tool, Revue.
Revue informed customers via email that the service would be discontinued on January 18, 2023. They also informed their users that the writers could download their data before it was deleted.
Revue is a newsletter-service-providing company from the Netherlands that was acquired by Twitter in January 2021. Twitter rebranded it as 'Revue by Twitter.'
Twitter made Revue's premium plans free for users and lowered the paid newsletter cost so that more people can buy the premium newsletters subscription thus, making more profit for both writers and the company.
According to some sources, Twitter CEO, Elon Musk is planning to buy another newsletter and publishing platform, Substack.
Substack is an American newsletter tool that provides a payment interface, analytics, and publishing features to writers for creating subscription newsletters. The company was founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its revenue is USD 9 million according to 2021 data and has 94 employees according to June 2022 data.
Elon Musk wants to build Twitter as the best publishing platform for developers.
Elon Musk has also confirmed that he will expand the character limit to 4,000 characters previously from 280 characters on the microblogging platform.
Twitter is also said to have to soon introduce 'Super Followers' through which publishers can show certain content to the followers who either have Twitter Blue or paid them for seeing premium content. This feature is inspired by the Youtube membership program in which YouTubers can upload special content for their supporters and donors.
These points, particularly the last, provide the features that Revue was providing, so there is no need to maintain another platform.
Twitter is soon expected to come up with a new newsletter tool.
Twitter has seen lots of significant improvements since Musk purchased the platform, from removing useless employees to increasing working hours and putting restrictions on work-from-home culture. He is also shutting down Twitter offices to reduce costs and forcing employees from certain departments to work from home.
I guess the decision of shutting down Twitter's newsletter tool is quite early as there is no official announcement that Elon is purchasing Substack. Revue has created a large user base in a small time and after the official announcement of shutting down the platform those users might be looking for alternatives and some may already have moved to other newsletter tools. Elon should first buy Substack then merge both Revue and Substack users and then he should shut down Revue.
Revue has shut down new user registrations and the user's data is available for download. The homepage of Revue redirects to the article on their help section where they state that they "have made the difficult decision to shut down Revue."
The article does not include the reason for shutting down the newsletter tool.
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