Twitter has added newsletter facilitator Revue which allows contributors to create subscriptions revenue for their own email newsletters. The company competes with Substack, which takes a 10% share of contributor revenue against Revue’s 6% – which will be reduced to 5% under Twitter’s ownership. Revue has only five employees and has raised just $300k in funding.
Revue will remain a standalone brand and will provide both a free and paid-for newsletter service to niche content creators including journalists and content curators. Twitter ownership should enable Revue to grow their subscriptions. Over 20% of US adults are said to use the platform, with 70% of these accessing its news feed.
In other developments within the busy newsletter space, Rolling Stone is to pay fees to thought leaders as it expands its influencer community. Further, Forbes has announced its intent to hugely expand its newsletter profile alongside the substantial newsletter offers from the Washington Post and New York Times, while hyperlocal news company Patch is launching Patch Labs to help local news journalists develop their own newsletters.
Substack has already attracted well known journalists away from employers to build revenue-creating newsletters on its platform that now has over 25k newsletters, with a reported $7m revenue generated by the 10 most popular.
The Forbes approach is to retain staff on the payroll but allow them to earn from a share in subscription and ad revenues they generate through creating additional newsletters as “Journalist Entreprenuers” which will still be managed and marketed by Forbes.
