Technical / Twitter working on a new paid subscription platform: Report

Technical: It seems Twitter is gearing up to launch a new subscription-based platform, a job posting on the company’s career’s website revealed. The platform is currently codenamed Gryphon and it’s unclear when it will launch or what exactly it will be. We have written to Twitter for clarification and will be updating this story if the same is obtained.

The job posting says that this will be a “first for Twitter" and the company is hiring a team of web engineers who will be working closely with both the Payments team, and the Twitter.com team. Other than paying for ads and promoting tweets, Twitter so far hasn’t done payments-based services.

Anything more about the platform is speculation at this point, but speculations are that Twitter might allow influencers and creators to get paid for their tweets. It’s possible that the company will build a feature that asks users to pay for access to certain Twitter accounts, or perhaps certain services.

The feature would be similar to Facebook’s fan subscriptions that had been reported around July last year. Twitter could take a cut out of what users pay to subscribe to a creator’s account.

Twitter also collaborates with brands and organizations for live events etc. The company could use that to make a subscription-based tier for the platform, which gives users exclusive access to such features.

Experts have often pointed out that Twitter lost out in the social media race to Facebook, failing to make enough money or garner as many users as Facebook. The platform though remains important in the space and has taken important decisions, like putting warning labels on US President Donald Trump’s posts, starting a debate around how politicians are moderated on social platforms.

The micro-blogging platform has been launching a flurry of new features recently, headline by Fleets, it’s version of Snapchat and Instagram’s Stories features. The company also announced new ways for users to control conversations and also post voice notes on the platform.