Twitter is shutting down Revue, the newsletter platform it acquired in January last year. The service will no longer be accessible from January 18, 2023, the company announced on Wednesday. “On that date, Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted,” the official press release states. The company has also notified users about this via email.
According to Revue’s announcement, all paid Revue subscriptions will be set to cancel at the end of their billing cycle on December 20, 2022. This is to ensure that there’s no active subscription when the service itself goes away in January next year. If you run a paid newsletter, you can download your subscriber list, past newsletter issues, and analytics ahead of that deadline from here. This data will not be available after January 18, 2023.
Twitter is shutting down Revue two years after its acquisition
When Twitter acquired Revue, the company said the service fits perfectly in a natural expansion of its platform. Paid newsletters were booming around then and Revue was preferred by many journalists and writers as it took a lower cut of revenue than rivals such as Substack. The social network biggie wanted to leverage that and attract more people to the service by integrating it deeper into the platform. For writers, it helped them reach more audiences and potentially monetize their Twitter following. For readers, it enabled easier access to newsletters.
In August 2021, Twitter added Revue subscription buttons to writers’ profiles for quick access. It followed up by adding a similar button to tweets containing links to a Revue profile page or individual issues of a Revue newsletter in October. Users could sign up for newsletters directly from tweets. However, in a few months, the craze of paid newsletters started to die down, pushing Revue towards extinction. Then Elon Musk entered the scene. He purchased the social network for a whopping $44 billion saying he would simplify the platform and develop it into the town square of the internet.
Shortly after completing the Twitter acquisition, Musk started removing some legacy features. The platform has already shut down Moments and also plans to stop showing the “tweeted from” labels. It is now pulling the plug on Revue as well, two years after its acquisition. It may be a mere coincidence, but this announcement came just a few hours after former Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey took to Revue to share his thoughts on the Twitter Files. “Well…after 17 hours, my career as a newsletter writer is coming to an end,” Jack tweeted yesterday.
2022-12-15 15:08:13