I was a little surprised to learn this morning that Twitter is shutting down its Revue newsletter service. Casey Newton first wrote about this back on November 3 in his Platformer newsletter, but subsequent articles after the massive layoffs confirmed that Revue is shutting down - and basically all the associated staff have been let go.
I had missed all those articles and just randomly saw a reference this morning when scanning social feeds.
It’s NOT actually surprising if you think about the fact that Elon Musk has to be laser-focused on revenue right now, particularly as his self-induced chaos is causing users and advertisers to leave Twitter. Revue was about long-form content published in email - and was not really a quick and easy way to increase advertising
So as they note, it’s all going away:
- December 20, 2022 – Revue will set all outstanding paid subscriptions to cancel at the end of their billing cycle
- January 18, 2023 – Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted
It’s too bad as it was a nice platform… if you were a strong Twitter user.
It had the nice feature that it showed up right on your Twitter profile page, offering people the ability to easily subscribe:
On the back end, there were some simple tools to easily add tweets into your newsletter.
Also, unlike Substack, you could set up your Revue newsletter with a custom domain, such as I did with choices.danyork.com.
So What Will I Do Next?
As that image shows, I started a newsletter on Revue called “A Choice of Futures” back in October 2021 and published a whopping two issues! 🎉
I had great plans to do more, but ran into several challenges in timing and then got super busy with work and volunteer responsibilities in 2022.
But I was thinking about getting back to it in 2023.
So what now?
I could move that newsletter over to Substack, Medium, AWeber, or any of a zillion other places.
Or.. I can just shut down this particular newsletter.
Realistically, that’s probably what I’ll do. Send one final issue as the period at the end of the sentence, and then be done.
You see… I actually already have a Substack newsletter at danyork.substack.com called “A View From The Crow’s Nest” where the intent is to write about new technology out on the horizon. It’s an even older newsletter that I used to run through an email service provider. I moved it to Substack back in March 2020 when Substack was getting a lot of attention. I wanted to learn about Substack and it was my intention to start doing more with it.
But then.. pandemic… and so much else of the craziness of COVID-19 and how our world was changing. I dropped that newsletter and so much else, just caught in the moment of trying to make it through each day.
By the time late 2021 came around and I was interested in a newsletter again, I had some concerns about the direction Substack was going… and so I thought I’d give Revue a try.
Ha!
Turns out the concerns would end up being with where Twitter and Revue were going instead! (Although I do still have concerns about Substack!)
So that will be my personal plan. I’ve hit the button to export all my data from Revue, and I’ll invite folks there to join my other newsletter on Substack.
Any of you reading this are welcome to join too!
