Would you pay for a premium version of Twitter? CEO Jack Dorsey is apparently counting on it: Dorsey reportedly told analysts on an investor call last Thursday (July 23) that the social media platform is considering rolling out a subscription model to help cope with a decline in advertising revenue.
“You will likely see some tests this year” of various approaches to a subscription model, Dorsey said on the call, which was held to discuss the company’s second quarter earnings results. Dorsey also mentioned he has “a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter,” but confirmed that Twitter is in the “very, very early phases of exploring” how it can diversify its sources of revenue.
“We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business,” Dorsey said on the call. “We do think there is a world where subscription is complementary, where commerce is complementary, where helping people manage paywalls … we think is complementary.”
There’s no word yet on what a potential subscription model of Twitter would entail or how much it would cost, but the company is going to need to get creative to deal with the drop in advertising it has experienced due to the pandemic. Its second-quarter ad revenue of $562 million represented a 23 percent decrease from the same quarter last year.
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