Twitter acquired Revue last year, and Revue has been a fantastic Email Marketing platform for writers. But Elon Musk decided to shut it down, and it is easy to guess why.
The platform, which competed with services like Substack and Medium, assisted writers in generating income from their Twitter following by integrating their newsletters into the Twitter timeline.
One day after Jack Dorsey shared his opinions on the Twitter Files on Revue, Twitter declared it would shut down the newsletter platform early in the upcoming year.
In 2021, Twitter purchased Revue for an undisclosed sum as the demand for newsletters increased due to the pandemic and sought to draw users who wanted to monetize their followings. At the time, Twitter had stated that all users would have access to Revue’s premium features for free and would reduce the cost of the paid newsletter to help authors keep a more significant portion of subscription fees.
This is not the first time Twitter has bought and then shut down a platform for long-form content. After purchasing Posterous in 2013, Twitter shut down the blogging platform. Facebook has also struggled to keep up an integrated platform for long-form content. After being dormant for years, their Notes platform was shut down.
It’s interesting that Musk recently declared his intention to increase the maximum character count for tweets from 280 to 4,000.
Regrettably, Twitter did not fully utilize the potential of Revue as part of its effort to provide creators and influencers with a monetizable platform.
Still available to creators are Super Tweets and other advantages of Twitter Blue. But it’s obvious that those features aren’t yet attracting the number of content producers and creators the platform needs to generate substantial revenue.
Many of Twitter’s long-form writing products, including those created through acquisitions, appear to be losing interest.
Ultimately, the lesson for all brands is that content creators should never entrust platforms like social networks to host their work. Fortunately, Revue users in this situation have at least 30 days to download their subscribers and content and move them to a new service.
If you are looking for a worthy Revue alternative, I suggest Mailchimp.
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