Twitter witnessed a 23 percent decrease in ad revenue this quarter due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In an effort to diversify its revenue, the company has confirmed its plans to test a subscription model.
According to a tweet on Twitter’s official Investor Relations handle, these new revenue products are still in the early stages. The platform doesn’t expect revenue against these sources this year.
We're also in early stages of exploring add'l potential revenue products that complement our advertising business, which may include subscriptions & others. It is very early; we do not expect any revenue against these in 2020. $TWTR
— Twitter Investor Relations (@TwitterIR) July 23, 2020
On an investor call, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told analysts to expect some tests this year. He added that he has a “really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter.”
“We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business. We do think there is a world where subscription is complementary, where commerce is complementary, where helping people manage paywalls … we think is complementary,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
This is not the first time we’re hearing about Twitter’s plans to introduce a subscription model. Earlier this month, a job listing for Twitter’s project “Gryphon” was spotted online. Although Twitter first edited the job listing to remove all mentions of its internal team, subscription, and Gryphon, the company subsequently restored all the details.
There’s still no concrete information on how this subscription would work. However, the wait to learn more would probably not be too long. A safe guess would be an ad-free version of the platform – a tried-and-tested approach that a lot of companies have implemented, but we will have to wait to see if Twitter has anything better to offer.
