Home Technology Twitter acquires ad-blocking news service Scroll

Twitter acquires ad-blocking news service Scroll

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We’ve known for a fair while now that Twitter is looking at ways to receive revenue, with the social media site not being able to convert its wide user base into an equally strong money-making machine the way that Facebook has. To change this, the company is looking at a variety of paid offerings to cater for different users and allow for better interaction between creators and their followers.

And now we might just see another glimpse of what the company has for us in the future, as Twitter has announced that it has acquired Scroll, a small company which specialises in removing ads from certain news sites, with those new sites then getting some remuneration from the company in return.

It seems like an odd fit for Twitter, but it will reportedly form part of a larger plan where the company will allow for people to read articles from their favourite news outlets. A portion of the subscription will go to the publishers and writers of the content, while Twitter will automatically take control of the ads and content through the Scroll app.

As VP of product Mike Park said to The Verge:

To do this, we plan to include Scroll as part of an upcoming subscription offering, we’re currently exploring. As a Twitter subscriber, picture getting access to premium features where you can easily read articles from your favourite news outlet or a writer’s newsletter from Revue, with a portion of your subscription going to the publishers and writers creating the content.

This could be a decent plan for the company and could see Twitter trying to take on the likes of Apple News or Facebook Newsfeed in trying to provide better quality content for users, with Twitter leveraging Scroll’s current ecosystem to provide this.

I’m not sure how many people will want to pay Twitter for this kind of service, but I guess we’ll need to see how it is implemented and what other features Twitter builds into this new subscription service.

Last Updated: May 6, 2021

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