In a first, Twitter has announced a subscription feature on its platform.
Called Super Follows, the product mimics the likes of Substack and Patreon, and charges a monthly fee of $4.99 for tweets and other additional content such as access to community groups, newsletters, and super follower badges indicating support.
Super Follows is primarily targeted at content creators and publishers, and lets their fans directly pay for what they consume.
“Exploring audience funding opportunities like Super Follows will allow creators and publishers to be directly supported by their audience and will incentivise them to continue creating content that their audience loves,” said a Twitter spokesperson.
In an analyst call on Thursday, Twitter outlined its plans to double revenues from $3.7 billion in 2020 to $7.5 billion by 2023.
Photo: Twitter
Besides Super Follows, Twitter announced a Facebook Groups-like Communities feature that will let users create, discover, and join micro-communities based on their interests, whether it is cats, music, plants or something else. Twitter is also said to be exploring a tipping option, details of which will be shared “in the coming months”.
In an analyst keynote, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that the company had not been “innovative” enough compared to some of its competitors.
Twitter wants to correct that by increasing the “development velocity” of new features that “directly drive either mDAUs (monetisable daily active users) or revenue“. Its wants to grow its mDAUs by 20 percent or more until 2023, to reach 315 million mDAUs.
The microblogging platform also said in its analyst presentation that its monthly user base grew 40 million in Q4 2020, up from 26 million in Q4 2019. The new product developments had helped increase revenues by three times between 2018 and 2020, said the company.
The social networking major highlighted safety as a pillar of its future growth. “This means making sure conversations are safe from abuse and harassment and that we do everything we can to reduce spam and misleading information,” added Twitter.
