Twitter is working on a new subscription platform, hints job listing
There’s a new team inside Twitter working on subscriptions.
www.theverge.com
Twitter appears to be working on a subscription platform for its social networking service. A new job listingreveals that Twitter has a new internal team, codenamed “Gryphon,” that is “building a subscription platform.” Twitter is currently recruiting engineers to join this subscription team, with employees collaborating closely with the company’s payments team.
The job posting notes potential Twitter subscriptions would be “a first” for the company, but it’s not clear exactly how Twitter plans to implement a subscription service. Twitter generates the vast majority of its revenue through ad sales and data licensing currently, and a subscription service could potentially provide exclusive content in return for a monthly fee.
Twitter has previously investigated offering subscriptions as a paid service for power users. The company ran a survey a few years ago to assess whether Twitter users would pay for new analytics, breaking news alerts, or information about what an account’s followers are tweeting about.
Twitter may also be considering a Twitch- or Patreon-style type of subscription, where you could subscribe to individual accounts in some way. We’ve reached out to Twitter to comment on its subscription plans, and we’ll update you accordingly.
Following publication of this article, Twitter revised the job posting to remove mention of a potential subscription feature in development or the Gryphon team working on it. The listing now says the company is simply looking for an Android engineer to “work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users.”
