Hello Twubstack. Twitter announced Tuesday buys one of Substack’s newsletter service competitors, the Smallest Revue, on an agreement on undisclosed terms.
In an era of mass media consolidation, layoffs and employment opportunities in both national and local journalism teams, Substack has become a sort of Patreon alternative that allows journalists and commentators to easily create their own. subscription-based sites. with limited moderation. (Substack is essentially a combination of a newsletter service and a blogging platform like Medium.) It grew in 2020, inspiring all sorts of takes i thoughts on whether it represents the future of the news. Some of the most high-profile Substack converts have been journalists and bloggers with big Twitter followers, such as Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias, who starred in dramatic break-ups with their previous employers. But other users include former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen, former Virgin tech journalist Casey Newton, newspaper columnist David Sirota, rock critic Robert Christgau, academics and comedians.
So it’s no surprise that Twitter — without which many of these writers and publishers would have struggled to build audiences independent of their employers — wants a slice of the pie. According to the New York NewsTwitter executives had debated the purchase of Substack directly before co-founder Hamish McKenzie defeated the idea.
In a blog post, Twitter detailed some of the ways it hopes to make Revue a viable competitor to Substack, including direct integration to the main site or app, which would eventually allow users who have spent years Twitter directly monetize their followers:
Our goal is to make it easier for them to connect with their subscribers, while helping readers better discover writers and their content. We imagine many ways to do this, from allowing people to subscribe to newsletters of their favorite followers on Twitter, to new settings for writers to host conversations with their subscribers. Everything will work perfectly on Twitter.
And for those who want to generate revenue, we are creating a lasting incentive model through paid newsletters. Bringing Revue to Twitter will supplement this offering, helping writers grow their paid subscribers, while encouraging them to produce engaging, relevant content that drives conversations on Twitter.
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Twitter wrote in the post that it has also made all Revue features free for users immediately and reduced the commission rate to 5% compared to the previous 6%; Substack takes 10% of all subscription fees.
It’s unclear how much Twitter pays for the company, but it’s much smaller than Substack: Crunchbase reported that it raised about $ 486,000 in initial investor funding, as opposed to Substack $ 17.4 million in financing. Revue, however, has attracted some notable publishers such as Vox Media and the technology site The Markup, according to TechCrunch.
Twitter banned its most notorious user, Donald Trump, earlier this month and is trying to reinvent himself quickly (perhaps a too late) as a place known for more than relationships and rage tweets. The acquisition of Revue is just the latest in a series of new feature releases, possibly in response to a failed investor-led coup. Elliott Ventures hedge fund last year, which claimed the company was stagnant and did not reach its potential sources of income.
Twitter has done that deployed Fleets, a clone of Snapchat and Instagram auto-delete stories, after buying a small template maker called Chroma Labs. He recently bought one company called Breaker to speed up the launch of Spaces, an audio chat tool that competes with Clubhouse, a popular application among libertarians Silicon Valley type. Other recent acquisitions include Squad, a screen sharing app, i CrossInstall, an advertising technology company that could help Twitter consolidate its notoriously old-fashioned ad functionality. Monday, Twitter too announced Birdwatch, a pilot program that has recruited up to about 1,000 users so far to add annotations made to the misinformation and deceptions that keep running wild on the spot.