Twitter announced on Thursday the launch of its first subscription service, dubbed Twitter Blue, designed for users willing to pay a monthly fee for exclusive features.
The company said Twitter Blue will be available to users in Canada and Australia respectively for $3.49 and $4.49 in local currencies per month. The company did not disclose when the service will become available to users in the U.S., Nigeria or other countries.
Twitter Blue users will get an “undo tweet” feature that allows them to set a customisable timer of up to 30 seconds to take back a tweet if it needs to be fixed. The feature is not quite an edit button, a feature often requested by users, but it will allow subscribers to preview what their tweets look like and adjust them before they’re published, Bloomberg reports.
Other features include: bookmark folders for users to organise tweets they save, a reader mode that makes it easier to read long threads, the option to customise the Twitter app icons on their phones, access to colour themes for the Twitter app, and dedicated customer support.
Twitter Blue is the company’s first attempt at a subscription business model and could diversify Twitter’s revenue streams. Advertising makes up more than 85 per cent of Twitter’s revenue, according to its first-quarter earnings report.
According to the product lead in charge of subscriptions, Sara Beykpour, the product suite is targeted at the most prolific of Twitter’s 200 million daily users, including journalists, social media managers and those who use the site as their primary news source.
“Twitter Blue is aimed at customers who are our most engaged, our most passionate super users who really want to take their experience to the next level,” said Ms Beykpour.
