Washington: Micro-blogging site Twitter had previously confirmed that it is exploring a paid subscription model for some features, and recently speculations have come to light about how much this new subscription-based service will cost and what it will be called.
According to The Verge, Jane Manchun Wong an app researcher tweeted on Saturday that the paid version, which is Twitter Blue, will cost USD 2.99 per month, and will include an Undo Tweets feature and bookmark collections.
Wong said 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 spokesperson from Twitter declined to comment 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.
It also rolled out a Tip Jar feature to allow users to make donations to some creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits, although this one raised some privacy concerns about what user information is included along with the tip.
Earlier this month, Twitter acquired Scroll, the USD 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.
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.”
This 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 USD 68 million on revenue of USD 1.04 billion. The company reported a 20 percent increase in monetizable daily active users.
As per The Verge, currently, there’s no word on when a premium paid version of Twitter would launch, or who would be eligible.