Twitter Revue

» see getrevue.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

revue was a small utrecht-based newsletter tool that lived in substack's shadow for five years before twitter noticed it. martijn de kuijper and mohamed el maslouhi started it in 2015 as an editorial-newsletter builder for writers and publishers. customers included vox media and the chicago sun-times. by april 2018 it had roughly thirty thousand users with paid subscription features beginning to roll out. it was a small calm business doing one thing well.

twitter acquired revue in january 2021 under jack dorsey, in a move that read as a defensive answer to substack's writer-economy moment. integration followed quickly. signup buttons appeared on twitter profiles, and the option to subscribe from inside a tweet shipped soon after. for about eighteen months it looked like the kind of acquisition that might actually stick, since the distribution and newsletter fit was real on paper.

elon musk closed the deal on twitter in october 2022. on december 14 2022 revue users got an email saying the service would shut down on january 18 2023 and all data would be deleted. jack dorsey had started a revue newsletter the day before to publish his thoughts on the twitter files, which made the timing read worse than it probably was. paid subscriptions cancelled on december 20. users were given a window to export their subscriber lists and past issues.

i never ran a newsletter on revue. by 2021 newsletter platforms were more of a writer's tool than an engineer's tool, and the people i followed who did run one tended to be on substack or buttondown. revue's twitter integration was the closest i got to it. the email announcement was a familiar pattern by then for any acquired indie tool that got absorbed into a bigger platform.

~ the record ~

~ what twitter wanted from it ~

substack's writer-direct economy was the threat. in 2020 and early 2021 a generation of journalists with twitter audiences was migrating to substack, taking their subscribers with them and routing future ad-money around twitter entirely. buying revue gave twitter a way to keep that money on-platform, with creator subscriptions paying revue a cut of revenue while twitter kept the distribution moat.

the math probably worked. twitter killed revenue share fees in march 2021 to compete with substack on pricing, which signaled how seriously the platform took the threat. integration shipped through 2021 and into 2022. the product never broke out though, partly because substack already had brand-name writers, and partly because revue's editor was workable but not better than what already existed.

~ what musk-era twitter killed ~

by late 2022 the acquired-product graveyard inside twitter was filling up. tweetdeck pivoted to subscription. twitter circles launched in a half-finished state. revue had no revenue worth defending and no headcount worth keeping. the wind-down took five weeks from announcement to deletion, which is fast for a product with active paying subscribers.

users who treated revue as their primary newsletter list were left to migrate to substack or buttondown in december-january. the export tool did work, so most lists survived the move. what did not survive was the on-twitter discoverability or any subscriber who had signed up via a profile button and forgotten the underlying email address.

~ the long tail ~

the utrecht office had already been wound down. revue's original team had mostly left by mid-2022 in the standard post-acquisition fade. de kuijper moved on to other things. the brand stopped being mentioned in industry coverage well before the formal shutdown. when the january 18 deletion landed it was less an event than a confirmation that nothing was holding the lights on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »