Twitter announced big changes to their platform yesterday which includes ability to charge people for access to additional content and joining groups based on common interests.
These are changes that were rumoured to be considered by Twitter early this month. This will make Twitter more competitive when compared to Facebook, Reddit, Substack and even OnlyFans.
Starting with Super Follows, it allows Twitter users to charge followers for extra content. This could be access to a community, subscription to a newsletter or bonus tweets. This may allow creators and publishers to get paid directly by their fans. Obviously Twitter will take a cut from the subscriptions and this has become a popular move by social networks to encourage growth while also paying the creators on these sites.
The other huge feature update was Communities. It appears to be similar to Facebook groups where people can create and join groups around specific interests. This will build up on what Twitter has been doing with their topics feature where you can subscribe to see different topics hitting your timeline. I can see this feature being popular with sports or even animal Twitter (dog and cat Twitter will love this)/
Twitter did not give a timeline for the roll out of this features but this will change how we see tweets on the timeline. The company is finally waking up after being largely the same for a decade now and it has new competitors in the space. It has also been largely dependent on advertising for revenue and the new changes could be a significant revenue stream for the 15 year old company.
