Twitter Acquires Email Service, Revue
Looking to keep up with other social media companies that enable publishers to earn money from their followers and and the growing popularity of newsletters, Twitter announced today that it acquired an email newsletter services Revue.
Spending in advertising has plummeted of recent, in in large part because of the pandemic. Publishers with good followings looking for new sources of revenue to stay afloat are finding it in paid subscriptions.
Some elite publishers using the larger email publishing platform, Substack, which allows for paid subscribers, are replacing their ad revenue, altogether, with subscriptions.
The New York Times’ Kate Conger, reporting on the Revue acquisition, shares that late last year Twitter was even considering the purchase of Substack.
Revue, based in the Netherlands, has six employees and plans to operate independent of Twitter for now.
Should blogging lawyers or lawyers, in general, look to platforms such as Revue or Substack as a source of revenue for the commentary and information they are sharing?
Not really, unless you have already achieved rockstar status in publishing or otherwise.
David Lat, the founder of Above the Law and now publishing a new email publication is an example of such a rockstar for which paid subscriptions may be possible.
As a lawyer, you already have a revenue stream from publishing. Getting paid for legal services you render will generate far more for you than email subscription revenue will.
Focus on the strategic publishing of your niche blog, with the ancillary use of social media, to build a name and relationships. It’ll take time to master the skill, but it’ll pay better than learning how to grow subscription revenue.
Lawyers should also always look at the business model of the service or platform they are going to use,.
For Revue and Substack, it’s generating money through subscriptions for email publishers. That’s where these publishing platforms are focusing their development work.
Such a model is not directed towards lawyers getting work by word of mouth and relationships. The platforms’ evolution and feature development will focus on helping users with other goals.
Could there be something of value to publishing lawyers coming from Revue? It’s possible when you read between the lines of what Twitter shared in a blog post, reported on by Conger.
”“Twitter is uniquely positioned to help organizations and writers grow their readership faster and at a much larger scale than anywhere else,” Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, said in a blog post announcing the deal. “Our goal is to make it easy for them to connect with their subscribers, while also helping readers better discover writers and their content.””
The biggest story in all of this, for now, may be get five smart and hard working friends who are willing to work for almost nothing, work your tails off on a hot niche and make enough of a splash to get acquired by a multi-billion dollar tech company in San Francisco.