Twitter rolled out its long-awaited new subscription service, Twitter Blue, in the U.S. today. It was previously only available to users in Australia and Canada.
For $3/mo, Twitter users can undo tweets, create a custom navbar, and access ad-free articles from the Washington Post, LA Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and hundreds more.
The subscription helps pay for stories that users read. It’s one way that Twitter hopes to “fund journalism.”
As an extension of the newsie features, Twitter Blue also includes a feature which breaks down the “most shared articles in your network.” It’s imaginatively called ‘Top Articles’ (and it updates every day.) The feature is basically Twitter reviving Nuzzel, which was part of Scroll, a company it bought back in May 2021.
Twitter Blue is not, however, an ad-free subscription. Twitter Blue does not remove ads or sponsored posts from the site. Instead, it supplements the core Twitter experience with features which may or may not be useful to certain users. Twitter is not trying to destroy its most lucrative existing line of revenue.
Investors seemed mostly unaffected by news of the launch. Perhaps they need more evidence that Twitter Blue will actually generate a meaningful new revenue source for the company.