Twitter Inc. has acquired Revue, a Substack Inc. competitor with a service that enables writers to publish email newsletters more easily and sell subscriptions to their content.

Under the deal announced today, Revue will continue to operate as an independent business for the time being. Its team, which currently has six people, will be expanded to support product development efforts.   

As a first step, Twitter has decided to make the previously paid Pro version of the service available at no charge. Revue Pro, which will now become the service’s free tier, enables writers to send email newsletters from their own website domains and customize parts of the default newsletter template. Twitter has on the occasion also lowered the fee the service charges on subscription sales to 5%, from 6% before.

Looking ahead, the social network plans on adding more features to help writers engage their audiences and acquire new readers. ”We’re imagining a lot of ways to do this, from allowing people to sign up for newsletters from their favorite follows on Twitter, to new settings for writers to host conversations with their subscribers. It will all work seamlessly within Twitter,” Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour and Mike Park, the company’s vice president of publisher products, wrote in a blog post today.

Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper provided additional details on the development roadmap in a separate update on the startup’s site. The Revue team is building a paid edition of its service with features tailored to newsletter creators with large audiences. “This version offers features like fully custom designs and tools to help them manage their audience, cross-promote newsletters and include subscription offers,” de Kuijper detailed.

The acquisition potentially puts Twitter on a trajectory to become a competitor of Substack Inc., a startup with an email newsletter publishing service that grew rapidly in popularity during 2020. Revue’s 5% fee on subscription sales is half of what Substack charges. If Twitter persuades even a small fraction of its vast user base to buy subscriptions to newsletters published via Revue, it could turn the acquisition into a significant revenue stream. 

Substack isn’t the only social media startup that can potentially expect competition from the company. Twitter recently debuted Spaces, an upcoming feature that will enable users to create audio-based conversation spaces. Spaces shares similarities with Clubhouse, a social media app operated by a startup of the same name that this week reportedly raised $100 million from a group of prominent investors at a $1 billion valuation.

Besides expanding to new parts of the social media landscape, Twitter has also been working to enhance its core platform. The company this week started piloting a program called Birdwatch that aims to combat misinformation by enabling users to fact-check tweets. 

Photo: Unsplash