Brands
Rumors of premium offer
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Photo: IMAGO / Roman Möbius
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The rumors have been going on for years: In order to become more profitable, Twitter could introduce a subscription service. As an app developer claims to have found out, the 280-character service could start a premium offer in the future that includes numerous additional functions.
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It is one of the big riddles of the internet: Why has social media darling Twitter never kept its big growth promise and – at least in dollars and cents – developed so much less dynamically than its rival Facebook, who is only two years older? And how is it that even much younger offers such as Snapchat or Pinterest are (at times) rated significantly higher on the stock exchange?
In the extremely turbulent 15-year history of the company, the main reason is the lack of profitability. Only three years ago, after numerous management changes, the 280-character service managed to present Wall Street in the black. For a company with a market value of over 40 billion dollars, Twitter’s net profits are still comparatively modest to this day. Just a plus of 69 million dollars was posted in the most recent quarter – not least because Twitter relies almost exclusively on advertising income to this day.
Subscription service for $ 2.99 a month?
For marketing professor Scott Galloway, the one-sided orientation of the business model is absurd. The bestselling author (“The Four”) has been calling for the introduction of a subscription service as an additional source of income since last year.
A year later, it now looks like it. As the app developer Jane Manchun Wong claims to have found out, the Internet pioneer is working on a premium service called “Twitter Blue” which will cost $ 2.99 a month.
The subscription service is intended to offer users additional functions. Wong shows about an “Undo send” function on her Twitter account, which is supposed to undo the posting of a tweet. Twitter subscribers could also offer a bookmark function in the future, as has long been the norm for articles on Facebook, for example. Users could then save tweets under certain categories.
Twitter is working on Bookmark Collections ???? ????
aka the “folders in bookmark” that lots of folks have asked for ???? pic.twitter.com/wUCEYca94i
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 14, 2021
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Another feature is to be called “Collections” and enable tweets to compile certain tweets into a collection; So far, Twitter users can only connect their tweets to one thread if they write a new one directly below the previous tweet.
As Wong predicts, Twitter could also introduce a tiered subscription model that offers additional features – such as the one it took over two weeks ago Adblockingdienst Scroll or the Revue newsletter service acquired in January.
At the end of February, on an analyst day, Twitter first gave a preview of new additional features such as business profiles and so-called “super follow”, which could also be incorporated into the tiered premium model.
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