Twitter has announced that it is acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that offers an ad-free news reading experience to its users. The development comes at a time when Twitter is planning to build its own subscription offerings.
The company has not revealed the financial terms related to this deal but Twitter has confirmed that it will be bringing the entire Scroll team, which consists of 13 people.
The upcoming premium subscription offering from Twitter will include access to Scroll, newsletter service Revue that it acquired a couple of months ago, as well as some other services from the company itself.
Commenting on this acquisition, Tony Haile, CEO of Scroll said in a blog post: “Twitter exists to serve the public conversation. Journalism is the mitochondria of that conversation. It initiates, energizes and informs. It converts and confounds perspectives. At its best, it helps us stand in one another’s shoes and understand each other’s common humanity.”
With this acquisition, Scroll will no longer accept new sign-ups but the service will continue to work as usual for the existing users. However, the company’s other offering, Nuzeel, which sends daily emails of top stories shared by people in user’s Twitter feed, is shutting down on 6th May. Twitter says that it will bring the core elements of Nuzzel directly to Twitter but the timeline for that is not yet revealed.
When subscribers use Scroll through Twitter, a portion of their subscription revenue will go to support the publishers and the writers creating the content, explains Twitter in an announcement. The service of scroll currently works across several sites, including The Atlantic, The Verge, USA Today, The Sacramento Bee, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Daily Beast, among others.
Earlier this year, Twitter revealed its plans to offer subscriptions to diversify its revenue stream. The upcoming offering, named “Super Follow” is a creator-focused subscription that would give paid subscribers access to an expanded array of perks, like exclusive content, subscriber-only newsletters, deals, badges, paywalled media, and more. With this offering, it plans to double its revenue from $3.7 billion in 2020 to $7.5 million in 2023.
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