According to the latest news, today, in the morning, Twitter announced that it has acquired Scroll, an online news subscription service. It will be part of Twitter’s larger plans to invest in subscriptions.
The company said, premium subscribers of Scroll will be able to read their articles from news outlets and from Twitter’s own newsletters product, Revue. It is to be noted that recently, Twitter acquires Revue and integrated it as a Twitter service. In an announcement, Twitter said when subscribers will use Scroll through Twitter, a portion of their subscription revenue will be utilized to support the publishers and the writers.
As of now, Scroll’s service works across hundreds of sites, including The Atlantic, The Verge, USA Today, The Sacramento Bee, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast, and others. Scroll’s pitch has been that it can offer cleaner content yet earn good advertising revenue.
As of now, Twitter didn’t reveal the deal terms but the company said it will discuss it with the entire Scroll team totalling 13 people. Scroll will pause new customer sign-ups for the time being so that it can focus on integrating its product into Twitter.
After the deal is finally settled, Scroll will continue to onboard new publishers who want to participate in Scroll’s network. Scroll will use its private beta to integrate the product into Twitter. Twitter said it will wind down Scroll’s news aggregator product, Nuzzel but will integrate some core elements of Nuzzel into Twitter.
After Twitter acquired Scroll, Tony Haile, Scroll’s CEO said “Twitter exists to serve the public conversation. Journalism is the mitochondria of that conversation. It initiates, energizes and informs. It converts and confounds perspectives. At its best it helps us stand in one another’s shoes and understand each other’s common humanity.
The mission we’ve been given by Jack and the Twitter team is simple: take the model and platform that Scroll has built and scale it so that everyone who uses Twitter has the opportunity to experience an internet without friction and frustration, a great gathering of people who love the news and pay to sustainably support it.”
Earlier this year, Twitter revealed it has plans to head into subscriptions so that it can diversify beyond ad revenue for its main business. Twitter unveiled Super Follow which is a creator-focused subscription. Twitter is aiming to use this new product to achieve its goal of doubling company revenue from $3.7 billion in 2020 to greater than or equal to $7.5 billion by 2023.
