Amid Substack Acquisition Rumors, Twitter Shuts Down Its Free Newsletter Tool

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 could buy premium newsletter subscriptions 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, allowing them to create subscription newsletters. The company was founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its revenue was USD 9 million in 2021 and it is made up of 94 employees according to June 2022 data.

Elon Musk wants to build Twitter as the best publishing platform for developers. And he has also confirmed that he will expand the character limit to 4,000 characters, a significant increase from the previous 280 characters on the microblogging platform.

Twitter is also said to be introducing ‘Super Followers’ soon. Through this, 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, show that substack provides the features that Revue was providing. So, why the need to maintain a new platform?

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 came 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. In my opinion, Elon should’ve bought Substack first, and merged its users with Revue users before finally shutting Revue down.

Revue has shut down new user registrations and each user’s data is available for them to 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.

Also published here.