There has been an ongoing statement on Twitter where people exclaim “How is Twitter still free” when they engage with certain posts on their timeline.
I love twitter I laugh so much how is this app still free
— chinita (@dpirezx_) March 14, 2017
lmaoooooo how is twitter free bro
— zoë (@bbygiirlzo) March 14, 2017
Well, now they are apparently exploring a way to charge you for using their service, and no it is not what you are thinking about.
According to Reuters, Twitter is considering to build a premium version of Tweetdeck which is aimed at professionals. As you can remember, Tweetdeck was an extremely popular third party app back in the day before it was acquired by Twitter in 2011. This could be the first time Twitter would be charging subscription fees on some of its users.
Twitter is apparently conducting a survey “to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck,” a spokeswoman, Brielle Villablanca gave a statement to the organization. “We regularly conduct research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals.
One Andrew Tavani leaked screenshots of this survey and it revealed several features that could feature on the ‘premium’ Tweetdeck. One is of course an ad free experience (obvious!), cross posting to other social media platform, advanced custom trend analysis and the apparent montyly fee would be $19.99.
2 more notes on ‘advanced TweetDeck’: 1. Monthly subscription fee Twitter is exploring in the survey is $19.99. 2. Complete list of features pic.twitter.com/YEOf9AQ9bt
— Andrew Tavani (@andrewtavani) March 24, 2017
This is actually great for Twitter. In the last quarterly results, the company revealed that they only increased their revenue by only 1% from Q3 2016 which is incredibly small delta change. Introducing a premium Tweetdeck would open up a new revenue stream for Twitter, which would at least stop the company from haemorrhaging more cash in the future.
So no more free tweetdeck?
Seems like there is going to be a free option and a premium option giving access to other features. What I’d hope though is they don’t take out any feature already existing on Tweetdeck. It’s the reason we stopped using Hootsuite and stuck with Tweetdeck.
Thats gonna be cool then.