This story was originally published and last updated .
Last year, Scroll was launched as an all-new way to pay for some of your favorite publishers — including us! — while blocking ads. The app tells sites not to deliver advertisements to your browser using third-party cookies, improving the experience immensely. Big changes for Scroll are on the horizon, though, as Twitter has announced its plans to acquire Scroll.
The social network has some major ideas for its new service. Twitter has been working towards diversifying its platform away from ads all year, introducing Super Follows and testing a paid “Undo Send” feature. Once the acquisition is complete, Scroll will factor into these new premium plans, giving users the ability to read articles and newsletters on Twitter as a subscriber. A portion of the monthly fee will go directly to publishers and writers, just as it works now, though the announcement doesn’t dive deeper into specifics. Twitter also plans to integrate Nuzzel, a personalized daily news service owned by Scroll, into its own application.
Unfortunately, there’s no indication of how the existing service will continue to operate after the acquisition. For now, Twitter plans to support current subscribers and publishers for the foreseeable future. Scroll is pausing new sign-ups while the acquisition runs its course, though interested publishers can request more information on joining the service at a later date. On the other hand, Nuzzel will shut down on May 6th, as its development team works to rebuild the app as a native feature.
Reading between the lines, Scroll certainly sounds like it’s headed towards prioritizing social media over all else. Twitter is increasingly interested in getting its users to sign up for premium content through subscription plans — it recently acquired newsletter service Revue as well — and Scroll will likely be at the forefront of this shift.
More premium details
Noted Twitter leaker Jane Manchun Wong showed off what appear to be screenshots of a version of Twitter now in testing, featuring a premium subscription service called “Twitter Blue.”
Twitter is working on tiered app subscriptions, for example, this one is called “Twitter Blue”
Twitter is working on letting users fine-tune the kinds of tweets where “Undo Tweet” will be applied, such as “Original Tweets”, “Replies”, “Tweetstorms” and “Quote Tweets” https://t.co/0ypf07u012 pic.twitter.com/nYFMkkitiz
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 14, 2021
This includes the ability to quickly “undo” a tweet (rapidly delete it, not edit it) with a timed button that appears for a period of five to thirty seconds. (We’ve seen evidence of this before.) According to Wong, the way this works is essentially an invisible delay on the post, very much like Gmail’s undo send option.
Twitter is calling their upcoming Subscription Service “Twitter Blue”, priced at $2.99/month for now, including paid features like:
Undo Tweets: https://t.co/CrqnzIPcOH
Collections: https://t.co/qfFfAXHp1o pic.twitter.com/yyMStpCkpr
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 15, 2021
Wong mentions other premium features like Collections, which seems like a more sophisticated bookmark system for saved tweets, and she reminds readers of the aforementioned integration with the Scroll news service. According to her, Twitter Blue would cost $2.99 a month, with more features (or adjustments of the ones we’re already seeing) in the pipeline.
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