Twitter's big subscription experiment

Twitter Blues itself

Twitter is going where very few social networks have gone before: the paid consumer market. The company on Tuesday launched its Twitter Blue subscription service in the U.S., marking the start of an intriguing experiment in how many paying customers a platform like Twitter can attract with the allure of just a handful of premium features.

Twitter Blue isn't a radical revamp. The undo send feature isn't quite the "edit" button many critics have been clamoring for, but it does serve a similar function by allowing you to quickly correct typos or rethink that questionable hot take before it's fired off to the public.

• Other than undo send, however, many of the perks of the subscription are previously free services Twitter acquired and tailored for its subscription platform.
• Scroll, which offered an ad-free news subscription and acquired the Nuzzel aggregator in 2019, makes up much of the backbone of the service. Twitter acquired Scroll and then shuttered Nuzzel earlier this year, and both have been turned into key features inside Twitter Blue in the form of an ad-free article perk and the new Top Articles section.
• Many of the other features are cosmetic, like being able to change the design of the app icon and pick a colored theme, and none of them is groundbreaking. Subscribing to Twitter Blue doesn't remove standard Twitter ads, for instance. So the jury is out on whether the company's offering justifies its $2.99 per month price tag.

A subscription product isn't exactly a bold gamble, either. Twitter has its standard free product and its existing and stable ad business, neither of which seems likely to be affected by the success or failure of Twitter Blue.

• But the service does send a signal to the rest of the industry that there could be a different way to monetize social platforms, especially if Twitter Blue becomes a strong revenue driver for the company down the line.
• Numerous social platforms that don't fit the mold of those operated by Big Tech, like Discord and Reddit, have relied on subscriptions to monetize for years. These approaches have helped alleviate or avoid some of the pressures of operating ad-supported platforms driven by quarterly growth and ever-larger profits.
• Google and Meta dominant countless software markets by subsidizing free consumer products with data collection and ad targeting. Facebook and Instagram in particular have gone so far as to threaten customers with a paywall of sorts when trying to convince iPhone owners to opt in to mobile tracking after Apple's iOS 14.5 changes.

Still, Twitter Blue feels like a glimpse at an alternative social media landscape. If customers can be convinced to pay for social networking products, then perhaps the entire attention-driven, data-based model that dominates the web today isn't the only way to do business.

• Many social networks have tried and failed to take privacy-first approaches or offer niche alternatives that deviate from the norm. But there are quite a few success stories.
• In addition to Discord and Reddit, the social platforms that have centered on community — like Pinterest and Twitch — have thrived by using alternative monetization approaches and avoiding a growth-at-all-costs mentality.
• One major pitfall to putting all your eggs in the advertising basket is getting caught in the crosshairs of even larger platforms. When Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency earlier this year, it wiped out an estimated $10 billion in revenue from Meta, Snap, Twitter and YouTube, according to a report last month from the Financial Times.

But it could also be a total flop. As of this past summer, when Twitter began verifying users again, the platform had just over 350,000 verified accounts that might qualify as the kinds of power users who would pay for a premium Twitter product. It's not clear how many everyday people get enough value out of Twitter, and see enough value in Twitter Blue, to fork over $2.99 every month just to catch their typos and read the occasional ad-free news article.

But as a demonstration of a premium social networking service that cuts down on ads and gives you more control over your experience, the service feels like a promising start. More tech companies, and social platforms in particular, should feel empowered to charge us for their products, and in the process treat us less like users and more like customers.

— Nick Statt (email | twitter)

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A MESSAGE FROM 4-H

"It's this type of bold action that the private sector can continue to lead the way on and why efforts like the 4-H Tech Changemakers program are so important as we leverage the skills of young people to help create opportunity for all." - Tina May, Land O'Lakes

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