Twitter to Buy Newsletter Provider Revue

“Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience–whether it’s through the one they built at a publication, their website, on Twitter, or elsewhere,” said Twitter’s product chief, Kayvon Beykpour, and vice president of publisher products, Mike Park, in a blog post.

With Revue, users write and publish their own editorial newsletters. Twitter said Revue will remain a stand-alone service under the deal and that it plans to expand the startup’s current six-person workforce.

Twitter also said it is making Revue’s premium features free for all users and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%, with Mr. Park saying the move will “help maximize the revenue writers earn from their audience.”

Revue has raised roughly $350,000 in venture-capital and angel-investor funding, according to PitchBook, a provider of private market data. It competes in the growing content-creation space with other newsletter startups such as Substack Inc. and Rocket Science Group LLC’s Mailchimp. Substack, backed by VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, was valued at nearly $49 million after a 2019 funding round.

Social-media companies have been increasingly interested in providing tools to help creators expand their audiences and make money from their content. Facebook Inc.’s Instagram, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok all announced plans last year to pay creators for videos, while startups like Patreon Inc. and Baron App Inc.’s Cameo gained popularity as the pandemic boosted demand for at-home entertainment.

Twitter executives have said the company was weighing the creation of a subscription service and posted jobs last year including one seeking someone to lead payment and subscription client work. On Tuesday the company affirmed its interest in what it called “audience-based monetization.”

Identifying subscription opportunities is one path the advertising-reliant social-media company could use to bolster revenue growth. Though Twitter revenue grew 14% in the third quarter from a year earlier as advertisers resumed spending on events and product launches grounded during the pandemic, it showed its slowest user growth in years. Twitter is due to report fourth-quarter earnings next month.

Twitter’s purchase of Revue also comes after the company on Monday said it was launching a program called Birdwatch to minimize the spread of misinformation. The initiative will encourage users to identify information in tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context.

Twitter’s latest efforts to prevent the spread of misinformation and make it more user-friendly are under way as the platform faces criticism from users over its content-moderation practices. The social-media company was among those that deactivated former President Donald Trump’s accounts, citing the risk of further incitement of violence after he posted several tweets encouraging protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 that led to a deadly riot.

—Bowdeya Tweh contributed to this article.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]

Corrections & Amplifications
Revue Holding BV competes in the growing content-creation space with other newsletter startups such as Substack Inc. and Rocket Science Group LLC’s Mailchimp. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said one such startup is Sinocism LLC, which is a Substack user. (Corrected on Jan. 26)