Twitter has big plans for paid subscriptions. Today announces the purchase of Scroll, a service that for $5 a month allows you to read news from web pages by removing ads. According to the company, Scroll will be integrated into the payment service that Twitter prepares at the end of the year.
Despite removing advertisements, Scroll is not a typical ad blocker. The service uses cookies so that advertising is not sent, but unlike blockers, it sends a percentage of the paid subscription to the websites we visit.
With the purchase of Twitter, the possibility is opened for the payment service of the social network to be an easy mechanism to “pay” for the news we visit. The user joins a monthly subscription, Twitter blocks media advertising and in return the media receive a percentage from Twitter based on user visits.
A new acquisition to strengthen the Twitter payment service
At the moment, many details of what the Twitter subscription service will be like have not transpired, but with the successive purchases in recent months it begins to have more body. At the end of January 2021, Twitter bought Revue to boost the newsletter.
With little more than a year of life, Scroll is a startup that offers an interesting model for users who want to pay for news and for media that are looking for a method to charge for them, without implementing a traditional payment wall.
“Scroll has created a way to read articles without ads, pop-ups or other elements that get in the way, cleaning up the reading experience and giving people what they want: just the content,” explains Twitter in a statement.
From the media side, Scroll allows you to generate more income than you would have with traditional ads, as they explain. A tool already used by media such as The Atlantic, The Verge, USA Today or The Daily Beast, among others.
With the purchase of Scroll, close Nuzzel
In 2019, Scroll bought the Nuzzel news service. With the acquisition by Twitter, the company has announced that Nuzzel will close on May 6, 2021.
Twitter reports that it has built an internal team with Nuzzel engineers to leverage their expertise and try to build it directly on Twitter. For current Nuzzel users, a channel has been enabled to share proposals.
