It is not news that Twitter is not turning in a profit and their revenues are dipping as shown by their latest quarterly release. It either has to cut down its operational costs (which it did when it axed off Vine) or come up with new ways of making money.
One way they can make money is offering a subscription service and that is what they are currently testing.
According to a form posted on Twitter Business, Twitter wants to convince a bunch of potential advertisers that they pay $99 a month for a campaign product that would do the heavy lifting for them.
“Instead of creating and optimizing separate Ads campaigns yourself, this program will do the heavy lifting,” they said under the FAQs. “You just need to continue using Twitter as you normally do- Tweeting updates, links and media that you want a larger audience to see. Then the promotion of your Tweets will be automated.”
In the beta program in particular, the participants will run a promoted account campaign for an entire month and a promoted tweet campaign that will include upto 10 tweets to be sent each day. However, according to the company, in order to participate in this private beta program, your previous ads account will no longer be accessible. When you sign up and the 30 days are over, you will be billed for the following months, based on the first billing dates.
This is not the first time we have seen Twitter being reported to be testing a subscription product. They were apparently considering a premium version of Tweetdeck, which makes sense since it is used by corporates to run social media accounts.