Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%.
I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.
Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).
It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. I mean I bought a Samsung TV for 1000USD and still it tries to show adds and spy. The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.
I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?
An edit button does not make sense for a service like Twitter. There are way to many ways to abuse it, and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.
> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).
So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.
> I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.
I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse.
It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read.
I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account.
Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.
> Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%.
Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way.
I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.
If they charge 5 to 15 reais per month 80% of Brazil’s users will exit Twitter and Facebook for the free competitor the same day. I suppose the same would happen anywhere the exchange rate is unfavorable.
A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.
Presumably none of these big players want to charge money for a pro service because it would be difficult to walk back on w.r.t ad revenue. The ad purchasers would probably take issue with it, especially given that they're explicitly valuing their user base at presumably less than they're charging for advertising access to them.
Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back
I am absolutely not convinced that Facebook and their like would make more money as a paid service. People are okay with giving up (or not knowing that they are giving up) privacy to use products like social media. Unlike television (where there aren’t any free alternatives), Facebook would lose market share overnight if a somewhat-competent but free competitor sprang up.
I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available.
I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.
I am very fearful of where that goes. Twitter and Facebook delete lots of conversations that offend their progressive political sensibilities. Even if people paid for these services, they would still be operating within those biased chambers as a result. I would rather have someone independent like Substack win this space instead of seeing these companies take it all just because of their financial warchests and the power of network effects making them immune to competition.
> And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.
The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.
100% agree with the business model switch. I think products have a natural business model and for Twitter it's not advertising. I think it took time for the market to have appetite to pay for more subs, but it's here now. I really think this takes Twitter to the next level.
The second you charge you cut out a large chunk of your audience. The second you cut out a large chunk of your audience you give up what makes Twitter useful. Facebook has the same issue, if only 10% of your friends are on there, why would you want to be there?
There is no way in hell Twitter is going to give up on ads any time soon. Maintaining a service like Twitter costs hundreds of millions of dollars in infra and workers and it's highly unlikely that Revue could cover those costs. Even if by some miracle, Revue manages to pays the bill, it would be impossible to justify to shareholders giving up on such a huge source of revenue that is ads.
You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.
In the new era of monopolistic common carrier platforms, you have to BUILD INTO YOUR BUSINESS PLAN what happens when you get screwed by, say, the Apple App Store, YouTube, or Twitter, et. al. It's a business risk, just like fire or flood. You have to have a contingency ready to go at a moment's notice. By example, Parler didn't.
With Revue and Substack, do the authors have access to subscriber email addresses? If so, that would somewhat blunt concerns like this, both directly (if you are booted off the platform) and indirectly (presumably the platforms would be less aggressive in their rules/enforcement if it is easy for authors to leave).
> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%
...and there goes Substack's entire business.
Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.
So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.
But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.
This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit.
The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.
This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter.
Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)
This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).
Instagram pictures don't show up on Twitter because Facebook blocked it. They did that in response to Twitter blocking Instagram from finding contacts via Twitter. Its FAANG in-fighting from like 8 years ago that I'm still kind of surprised hasn't been sorted out by now.
I listened to a podcast that included this story, it was a Facebook decision. Mark phoned and gave them a few hours heads up that 'Instagram' had decided not to allow the embeds any more. They actually got it delayed 24 hours or something like that to avoid breaking Twitter.
It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.
The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here
I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?
I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.
Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see.
Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?
As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money.
The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.
Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move.
Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.
Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.
As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.
[+] [-] siruva07|5 years ago|reply
Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).
It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
[+] [-] rightbyte|5 years ago|reply
I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?
[+] [-] user-the-name|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|5 years ago|reply
So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse.
It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read.
I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account.
Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.
[+] [-] Nacdor|5 years ago|reply
Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way.
I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.
[+] [-] motoboi|5 years ago|reply
A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.
[+] [-] hderms|5 years ago|reply
Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back
[+] [-] boogies|5 years ago|reply
You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).
[+] [-] nunez|5 years ago|reply
I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available.
I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Applejinx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|5 years ago|reply
The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.
[+] [-] jtsiskin|5 years ago|reply
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...
[+] [-] enos_feedler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dumbfounder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x1F8B|5 years ago|reply
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.
[+] [-] nathias|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickaljord|5 years ago|reply
tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening
[+] [-] prestigious|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pembrook|5 years ago|reply
...and there goes Substack's entire business.
Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.
So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.
But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.
[+] [-] jhunter1016|5 years ago|reply
The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pboutros|5 years ago|reply
Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)
[+] [-] nikivi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjlm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asicsp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FalconSensei|5 years ago|reply
For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?
[+] [-] Kye|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orliesaurus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pr0zac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coreyrab|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanwiggins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whimsicalism|5 years ago|reply
Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.
[+] [-] stakkur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|5 years ago|reply
https://blog.getrevue.co
[+] [-] nojs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cercatrova|5 years ago|reply
Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?
[+] [-] bachmeier|5 years ago|reply
The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AndrewLiptak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geonnave|5 years ago|reply
Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.
Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.
[+] [-] kareemm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_|5 years ago|reply