Twitter rolls out $4.49 subscription offering in Australia
Twitter has announced that Australia and Canada are the first two markets to be given access to its new subscription offering, Twitter Blue.
With a $4.49 price point in Australia (or CAD $3.49), Twitter Blue includes additional features including ‘Undo Tweet’, which allows users to preview and revise a tweet before it goes live.
Twitter Blue Sign-Up Page
The new service does not, however, have an edit function for tweets. Twitter also revealed that its free service will continue, with Twitter Blue offered as a way to enhance the “Twitter experience”.
In a post on its blog, Twitter said the launch of the services followed significant amounts of feedback from users that suggested the platform doesn’t meet their needs.
Sara Beykpour and Smita Mittal Gupta, of Twitter’s product team, said: “We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.”
The new Undo Tweet function works by giving the option to set a customisable timer of up to 30 seconds on each tweet, during which time you can click ‘Undo’ and go back to the draft.
Undo Tweet and Bookmarks
Other perks that will be afforded to paid members will include Bookmark Folders, designed to allow the organisation of saved tweets, and Reader Mode, which turns long threads into “easy-to-read text”.
“Subscribers will also get access to perks, such as customisable app icons for their device’s home screen and fun colour themes for their Twitter app, and will have access to dedicated subscription customer support,” Beukpour and Gupta wrote.
Twitter’s average monetisable daily active users was 199 million for Q1 2021, compared to 166 million in the same period of the previous year and compared to 192 million in the previous quarter.
In the April Q1 financial results release, the company said it was attracting more people to Twitter than ever before and investing in priorities to deliver on long-term goals across “consumer product, revenue product, and platform”. As a result, it is looking to grow headcount, total costs and expenses 25% or more on a year-over-year basis in 2021, ramping in absolute dollars over the course of the year.
In the same report, it said it was looking to add 123 million more users within the next three years. If Twitter can also provide more incentives to keep users on-platform for longer, and tweeting more often, that, ideally, will see it meet its growth targets.
The platform has indicated a raft of new features are coming to the platform, however, when and how significant those are to the platform is unknown. The company has been notoriously slow in its product development in the past, compared to its social media counterparts Facebook/Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok.
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Zanda Wilson was a reporter and podcast producer at Mumbrella, specialising in radio reporting. He left Mumbrella in September 2021.
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