Twitter acquires Dutch newsletter platform Revue

Announcing its second acquisition in the month of January, social media platform Twitter in a blog post on Tuesday said that it had bought editorial newsletter tool maker Revue. 

The purchase follows the acquisition of social podcast app, Breaker, announced earlier this month. 

Netherlands-headquartered Revue was founded in 2015 by Martijn de Kuijper and Mohamed El Maslouhi and had raised 400,000 Euros (Rs 3.53 crore according to current exchange rates) in an angel round, according to data available on Crunchbase.

The acquisition is part of Twitter’s attempt at audience-based monetization on the platform, said the post. Financial details of the purchase haven't been revealed yet.

“Our goal is to make it easy for them (writers and publishers) to connect with their subscribers, while also helping readers better discover writers and their content,” said the post authored by product lead at Twitter, Kayvon Beykpour and vice president of publisher products Mike Park.

“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," the post said. 

While the post did not mention the size of the deal, it said that with the acquisition, Twitter had made Revue Pro features free for all accounts and lowered the paid newsletter fee to 5%, letting writers keep a greater share of the revenue.

The five-member team at Revue will move to Twitter. “We will continue to invest in Revue as a standalone service,” said the post, adding that going ahead, the Revue team will build discovery, reading and conversational experiences around long-form content on Twitter. 

Interestingly, the micro-blogging site which started with a character limit of 140 has expanded it to 280 characters. With its entry into promoting long-form content and the newsletter space, Twitter will be taking on global competitors including Substack, Mailchimp owned Tiny Letter, among others. These companies provide platforms to help customers publish, collect payments and provide analytics for newsletters.