Twitter announced that it has acquired Scroll, a start-up offering a subscription plan to remove advertisements from news sites.
The idea is simple: for $ 5 a month, people can visit sites like The Verge, BuzzFeed News, Slate, Usa Today, and many more without being bothered by banners, pop-ups, or video ads. An extension for major browsers removes the ads from the page and records the visit, on the basis of which a payment is calculated for the publishers. Following the acquisition, the service will no longer accept new users, but will continue to work for those who are already subscribed.
For Twitter, the service represents a further step towards an optional paid offer, a sort of “Twitter Plus”, which the social network could make its debut before the end of the year. The acquisition of Revue, Substack’s competing newsletter service, and the announcement of a “ticketing” mechanism for Spaces, thanks to which people will be able to buy a ticket to access private channels of the service, also go in this direction. Twitter audio chat.
Dorsey’s plan begins to reveal itself in all its ambition: to create exclusive “premium” elements, which can be sold separately to subscribers, but which can then be combined into a single bundle of services. For this strategy to be successful, Twitter will need to be able to offer unique features and services that can differentiate the offer from that of competitors.
The acquisition of Scroll is perhaps the most convincing from this point of view, because it could allow the social network to approach the most skeptical publishers by offering “equal” partnerships that Facebook and Instagram have not been able to conceive so far. In particular, Twitter’s intention seems to be to ingratiate itself with the big publishing groups with a service that, in the words of the Vp of Product Mike Park, “allows them to provide clean content (from advertising, ed), but which can make more current business models “.
“To succeed in this – explained Park – we intend to include Scroll in a subscription offer that we are currently exploring. As a Twitter subscriber, imagine you have access to premium features to read articles from your favorite newspapers, or a journalist’s or writer’s newsletter on Revue, with a portion of the subscription going directly to the publisher or author of the content ”.