Image: Twitter
By Jack Morse
Newsletters are coming to a Twitter profile near you. Or, at least the chance to sign up for them is.
Twitter is set to continue its ongoing reinvention of the most sacred of social-media spaces — the user profile — in the next few weeks with the addition of a newsletter subscription button. The goal, as the company explained to Mashable, is to help newsletter writers better leverage their existing Twitter followers in an effort to grow their subscriber bases.
The “subscribe” button, which will live prominently on the profile pages of those who choose to turn on the feature, will be available to anyone with a Revue account (sorry, Substackers). The move shows the continued emphasis Twitter is placing on newsletters following its January acquisition of the subscription newsletter service.
Writers can use Revue to generate free or paid subscription newsletters. Twitter takes a 5 percent cut of the latter.
According to a mockup, Twitter users will be able to both subscribe to newsletters and read a “sample issue” directly on a writer’s Twitter profile page.
“Folks who have Revue newsletters will be able to enable this feature directly in Revue, and people who visit the writer’s profile on Twitter can subscribe directly,” explained a company spokesperson.
Twitter wouldn’t provide an exact date for when the new subscribe button will first be available, but said the addition is imminent — first coming to the web and Android, and then later to iOS.
Like with Tip Jar, adding newsletter subscribe buttons to Twitter profiles formalizes a practice that’s already taking place. However, instead of having to pin a tweet linking out to a newsletter or list a $Cashtag in a profile, creators on Twitter will soon have a purpose-built space for both of those potential revenue sources.
SEE ALSO: Twitter officially launches ‘Twitter Blue,’ its new subscription service
Because while Reddit may be the front page of the internet, a Twitter profile serves as an individual’s landing page — often showing up as the first Google hit when searching a writer or creator’s name — and Twitter knows that.
Today’s announcement shows that the company is making a genuine effort to help its users build on that reality. Let the subscriptions flourish.
