Twitter Explores Subscription Offering To Monetize Some Features

Amid COVID-19 and pressure from activist investors to speed up expansion, Twitter Inc. is reportedly developing a subscription product to lessen its reliance on advertising, Bloomberg reported.

Multiple Twitter workforces are looking into subscription products, such as one that harnesses the “Rogue One” code name, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. One of the concepts being considered has to do with “tipping” – letting users compensate individuals they follow for special material, according to the unnamed sources in the report. Additional potential methods to bring in subscription revenue include charging for functionalities like “undo send” or for services such as TweetDeck.

Targeted advertising provides the lion’s share of Twitter’s revenue. However, the business has expanded in recent years at a slower pace than rivals such as Snap Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to the report. While subscriptions have served as a tempting alternative to advertising, social networks have generally been a free service used to foster user expansion and engagement, with the monetization coming through ads.

However, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said in 2020 that some form of a subscription option would provide sales “durability,” and that subscription sales are more reliable than ad spend, Bloomberg reported. Last summer, the executive said Twitter was in the very nascent days of looking into a subscription offering, and intended to be selective regarding how it proceeds. Segal said the company has a “really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter.”

Lockdowns create fairly perfect conditions for social media platforms from a user engagement perspective, as people can’t venture from their homes to visit with family or friends are much more likely to log on to do so. However, the pressure is now on to monetize those views, and social brands are becoming creative in how they are doing that. Pinterest, for example, appears to be most keyed into building out its social commerce presence as a place where consumers go not just to discover merchandise – organically or via paid advertising – but also to buy it directly