Twitter Buying Scroll to Serve as Foundation for Subscription Service

Twitter has announced it is buying Scroll as it looks to establish a subscription service for premium content.

Twitter has been looking for ways to diversify its services and new ways to monetize its user base. Despite being one of the oldest social media platforms, Twitter has been surpassed in many ways by newer, upstart platforms.

The company is purchasing Scroll in an effort to introduce paid subscription services, free of ads. Twitter VP Mike Park announced the company’s plans on the company’s blog:

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Twitter is acquiring Scroll. Scroll has built a way to read articles without the ads, pop-ups, and other clutter that get in the way, cleaning up the reading experience and giving people what they want: just the content. Meanwhile, publishers who work with Scroll can bring in more revenue than they would from traditional ads on a page. It’s a better Internet for readers and for writers.

Twitter also hopes integrating Scroll will help it to assist the journalism industry, one that has experienced major setbacks as a result fo the digital transformation.

Those who create and consume news know that reading – and more broadly, journalism – deserve a better future. Scroll will help us build that future, solving one of the most frustrating parts about reading content online. We want to reimagine what they’ve built to deliver a seamless reading experience to our hyper-engaged audiences and allow publishers to deliver cleaner content that can make them more money than today’s business models.

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 favorite news outlet or a writer’s newsletter from Revue, with a portion of your subscription going to the publishers and writers creating the content.

Park said Scroll will pause new sign-ups while the service is integrated with Twitter. After the integration, Twitter will work on growing Scroll’s subscriber base.