Twitter shuts down Revue, its newsletter platform

Revue, the newsletter platform acquired by Twitter in January 2021, is shutting down. The platform helped writers monetize their Twitter following by integrating their newsletters directly into the Twitter timeline, competing with platforms like Substack and Medium.

Revue sent a message to newsletter writers today declaring, “We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Revue.” Writers have until January 18, 2023 to retrieve their data before it all gets deleted.

Twitter is working on making tweets 4,000 characters instead of 280, according to app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi and Elon Musk himself. But longer tweets don’t necessarily make up for the features that users will no longer access from Revue.

Twitter seems to be losing interest in many of its products relating to longform writing, including those that were birthed from acquisitions. Twitter acquired Scroll, an ad-free reading subscription, in May 2021, and then rolled it into the original, pre-Musk iteration of Twitter Blue, which had a feature that let users read ad-free articles from certain news outlets. But the subscription was not too popular, so when Musk waged layoffs across the company, Scroll and its team were on the chopping block.

Just yesterday, former Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey started a Revue newsletter to publish his thoughts about the Twitter Files, a series of threads posted by journalists like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, whom Musk granted access to internal Twitter documents.

“well… after 17 hours, my career as a newsletter writer is coming to an end,” Dorsey tweeted today.

Twitter shuts down Revue, its newsletter platform by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch