Twitter has previously confirmed that it’s exploring a paid subscription model for some features, and app researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted Saturday that she’s discovered how much it will cost and what it will be called. Twitter Blue, Wong says, will cost $2.99 per month, and will include an Undo Tweets feature and bookmark collections. Wong says it appears Twitter is working on a tiered subscription model, which she posits could mean a less-cluttered, premium experience for the highest-paying subscribers.
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment Saturday, but the company doesn’t usually confirm or otherwise comment on Wong’s typically accurate discoveries of new features before they launch.
Twitter has made a slew of new product announcements over the past several weeks, updating its warnings for potentially offensive tweets, improving its photo cropping algorithm to allow “taller” images to fully display in users’ feeds, adding the ability for Android users to search their direct messages, and rolling out a Tip Jar feature to allow users to make donations to some creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits (although that last one raised some privacy concerns about what user information is included along with the tip).
And earlier this month, Twitter acquired Scroll, the $5-per-month subscription service that removes ads from websites that participate. With the Scroll announcement, Twitter also said it would be winding down Nuzzel, a Scroll service that sent users daily email roundups of top stories in their Twitter feeds.
As Wong noted in a later tweet, Tony Haile, the former CEO of Scroll who is now on the product team at Twitter, tweeted the day his company was acquired that Scroll would “integrate into a broader Twitter subscription later in the year.” That would seem to suggest that one of the offerings of a premium Twitter product would be an ad-free experience, something it seems diehard tweeters have asked for almost as much as editable tweets.
In its first-quarter earnings report late last month, Twitter had a profit of $68 million on revenue of $1.04 billion. The company reported a 20 percent increase in monetizable daily active users.
There’s no word yet on when a premium paid version of Twitter would launch, or who would be eligible.
