Today, all current Revue newsletter users received an email letting them know that as of Jan. 18, 2023, the service will be discontinued.
Revue is a long form content newsletter service that Twitter acquired and integrated into the platform. It was quite beneficial to those who used it since it seamlessly encouraged Twitter followers to subscribe to the newsletter. And of course, it offered a long form content option that normal tweets couldn’t.
Here’s the full text:
Important: We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Revue.
We’ll cut to the chase: from January 18, 2023, it will no longer be possible to access your Revue account. On that date, Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted. This has been a hard decision because we know Revue has a passionate user base, made up of people like you.
In the meantime, you will be able to download your subscriber list, past newsletter issues, and analytics by following the instructions here.
If you run a paid newsletter, on December 20, 2022 we will set all paid subscriptions to cancel at the end of their billing cycle. This is to prevent your subscribers being charged for Revue content after the point where it is no longer possible to send newsletters from Revue.
We want to remind you that it is your responsibility to adhere to any applicable laws, rules and regulations in connection with your subscriber list and other data we share with you, and Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose.
We’re grateful to everyone who has used our service over the years, and hope we can continue to help you build a community with your readers on Twitter.
While this is clearly in line with Elon Musk’s continued efforts to reduce expenses within the Twitter platform after his takeover, it should also be noted that the Revue feature had not been prominent or well promoted of late, which suggests there’d likely been a decline in utilization for months, and a corresponding decline in allocated resources.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has acquired and then closed a long form content platform. In 2013, Twitter shut down the Posterous blogging platform after buying it. And Facebook has similarly struggled to maintain an integrated long form content platform. Their Notes platform was shut down after languishing for years.
Interestingly, Musk has said recently that he intends to extend the length of tweets from 280 characters to 4,000.
While it remains to be seen whether such a character increase will happen, or if it will simply be a pure change in what one can tweet, or a different kind of tweet (i.e. LinkedIn post vs. article), clearly there are other initiatives in the works to give Twitter users long form content options.
Regrettably, the idea of Revue was solid and something that Twitter failed to capitalize on as part of their initiative to give creators and influencers a monetizable platform. Creators still have other options like Super Tweets and other benefits of Twitter Blue. But clearly those features aren’t yet bringing in the volume of creators and content that the platform needs to drive real revenue for themselves.
And at the end of the day, the continued lesson for all brands is creators is never to trust platforms like social networks to house your content. Fortunately, in this case, Revue users at least have 30 days to download their subscribers and content and migrate them to a new service. For that, I personally recommend AWeber.
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