Say hello to Twubstack. Twitter announced Tuesday buy one of the competitors of the Substack newsletter service, the smaller Revue, in a business with undisclosed terms.
In an era of media consolidation, layoffs and the disappearance of employment opportunities in both national and local journalism outlets, Substack has emerged as a kind of Patreon alternative that allows reporters 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 and thoughts about whether it represents the future of news. Some of Substack’s best-known converts were journalists and bloggers with huge Twitter followers, such as Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias, who staged dramatic breaks with their previous employers. But other users include former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen, former Verge technology 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 editors would have struggled to build audiences independent of their employers – wants a cut. In accordance with New York Times, Twitter executives actually discussed buying the Substack before the idea was brought down directly by co-founder Hamish McKenzie.
In a blog post, Twitter detailed some of the ways it hopes to make Revue a viable competitor to Substack, including its direct integration into the main site / application, which would ultimately allow users who have sunk Twitter to directly monetize the following:
Our goal is to make it easier for them to connect with their subscribers, while helping readers to better discover their writers and content. We imagine a lot of ways to do this, from allowing people to subscribe to newsletters from their next favorites 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 income, we create a sustainable incentive model through paid newsletters. Bringing Revue to Twitter will supplement this offering, helping writers develop paid subscribers, while stimulating them to produce interesting and relevant content that leads conversations on Twitter.
G / O Media may receive a commission
Twitter wrote in the post that it also immediately did all the free Revue features for users and reduces the commission rate to 5% compared to the previous 6%; Substack takes over 10% of all subscription fees.
It’s unclear how much Twitter agreed to pay for the company, but it’s much smaller than Substack: Crunchbase reported that it raised about $ 486,000 in early financing from investors, as opposed to Substack $ 17.4 million in financing. Revue has, however, attracted some notable publishers such as Vox Media and the technology site The Markup, according to TechCrunch.
Twitter has been banned its best-known user, Donald Trump, earlier this month and is trying to reinvent itself quickly (maybe a a little too late) as somewhere known for more than rEPORTS and angry tweets. The Revue acquisition is just the latest in a series of new feature launches, possibly in response to a failed coup d’état led by hedge fund Elliott Ventures last year, which claimed that the company is stagnant and fails to realize its potential sources of income.
Twitter has launched Fleet, a clone of Snapchat and Instagram auto-deletion stories, after buying a small template maker called Chroma Labs. Recently bought a company called Breaker to speed up the launch of Spaces, an audio chat tool that competes with Clubhouse, a popular libertarian app Silicon Valley types. Other recent acquisitions include Squad, a screen sharing application, and CrossInstall, an advertising technology company that could help Twitter strengthen notorious obsolete advertising functionality. Monday also Twitter Birdwatch announced, a pilot program that has so far enrolled about 1,000 users to add factual annotations to the misinformation and pranks that keep running on the site.