Twitter Plans To Roll Out Subscription Offering

As it aims to double its yearly revenue and speed up user growth during the next couple of years, Twitter Inc. intends to debut a subscription offering for content creators and will look into implementing tipping, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Super Follows subscription effort will enable users to earn compensation for content. According to the report, the social media company intends to roll out the feature in 2021 and anticipates that it will be appealing to influencers with large numbers of digital fans.

Twitter could end up depending less on advertising by migrating to subscriptions. Ads comprised 86 percent of Twitter’s 2020 revenue. In January, the social media company said it had struck an arrangement to purchase the Revue Holding BV newsletter platform. Mailchimp and Substack Inc. are competitors in that space.

Twitter unveiled the new business models at a digital event, as part of the company's wider aim to hit a minimum of $7.5 billion in revenue by 2023. By the conclusion of that year, Twitter is forecasting a daily user base of at least 315 million.

Even though Twitter’s user base has long been expanding, the social media company is lagging behind rivals like Snap Inc. and Facebook Inc. Twitter disclosed 192 million daily users for the quarter concluding in December. By contrast, Snap reported 265 million and Facebook disclosed approximately 1.85 billion.

Lockdowns make for fairly ideal conditions for social media platforms from a user engagement perspective, as consumers who can’t venture out to see their family and friends are much more likely to log on to do so. While platforms have the eyeballs, the pressure now exists to monetize those eyeballs. Social brands are getting more creative in how they aim to achieve that: Pinterest, for example, seems most focused on building its social commerce presence as a place where consumers venture not just to find goods, but to buy them directly as well.