Twitter buys Scroll, a subscription service that gets rid of ads from news
Social media giant Twitter, which is known for instant and short-form expression, is investing more in the media business and long-form journalism.
The company announced Tuesday, April 4, it is acquiring Scroll, a startup that offers ad-free viewing of news sites for a monthly fee.
Scroll launched last January, essentially works with a handful of publishers, including Buzzfeed News, The Atlantic and USA Today and offers stories from those publishers to paying customers. It offers online readers an ad-free viewing of news sites.
Scroll will temporarily come to an abrupt stop to new subscribers while its 13-person team joins the social media company. The two companies declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
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“Those who create and consume news know that reading and more broadly, journalism deserves a better future,” Twitter’s vice president of product, Mike Park, noted making public the deal.
According to Mike Park, scroll is supposedly to help build that future, solving one of the most frustrating parts about reading content online.
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, said in July last year that the social media company was exploring paid products.
In January, Twitter announced its acquisition of newsletter company Revenue before teasing a feature called super follows, which allows creators on the platform to charge users for extra content in February.
“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 Revenue, with a portion of your subscription going to the publishers and writers creating the content,” Park said.
Executive officer, Tony Haile, said in a blog post: “if journalism were to disappear tomorrow, their business would carry on as much as before. Twitter is the only large platform whose success is deeply intertwined with the sustainable journalism ecosystem.
The social media company aims for ways to expand business outside of digital advertising, which creates volume of revenue. Scroll is Twitter’s sixth deal in the past six months.
