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Twitter wastes no time urging its users to make use of Revue

Just last week Twitter announced that it had acquired a Dutch startup known as Revue. The startup allows writers and publishers to create newsletters and profit off of them.

This morning upon logging into Twitter (which now features a very dark, dark mode) we spotted the first “integration” with Revue.

Hitting the “More” option from the Twitter website will reveal a new Newsletter option. Clicking “Find out More” won’t direct you to a new section of the Twitter website but rather forwards you to the Revue website.

Here you can sign up for an account, log in with an existing account or log in with Twitter. Unfortunately if you’ve used Google or Facebook to log into Revue before now you will have to use your email address and follow a few steps to set that login information.

According to TechCrunch, Revue has also paused Publisher-tier paid newsletters as it prepares its infrastructure for future demand.

Given that Facebook has also invested in building newsletter functionality for writers and publishers, having a newsletter is clearly a big business.

Revue allows monetisation of newsletters by authors and takes a five percent cut  for its services. There is a free tier that allows for managing subscribers, cross publishing to Medium and WordPress, analytics and more.

You can peruse the Revue features in full over on the website.

But is there really a demand for newsletters? Depending on the country, yes there is.

In its Digital News Report for 2020, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford found that while only 16 percent of survey respondents accessed news via newsletters. That is a small percentage but, importantly, those respondents tend to be more interested in news and have more disposable income.

“Email news users also tend to be older, with over-45s proportionally much more likely to receive them. By comparison, we find that mobile notifications are used equally across age groups. Email is popular both with news lovers – those who have high interest and high frequency of access – as well as with daily briefers, who tend to access news at a number of set times each day. Email is not a good way to engage casual users, who tend to favour channels where the news ‘comes to them’, such as television or social media,” wrote senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Nic Newman.

That study also found that newsletters can help reduce churn for publications that carry a subscription fee.

What is clear from the report is that newsletters have the potential to be a big money earner for publishers and what we’re seeing from Twitter and Facebook appears to be a play into that field.

This makes a degree of sense in that marrying an increasingly important tool with a service that is recognised could have the ultimate benefit of becoming a passive money maker for the social networks.

We are curious to see how these newsletter solutions play out in the future.

While we’re talking about newsletters, Hypertext sends out a daily newsletter recapping the top stories of the previous day. To sign-up simply key in your email address in the box in the column on the right. Be sure to select which newsletter you prefer before you click subscribe.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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