After reporting a drop in Q2 earnings that plunged its ad revenue, Twitter has said its exploring alternatives — dangling the possibility of a subscription option.
The social media giant had earlier reported ad revenues of $562M, down almost a quarter (23%) on a year ago — saying that the pandemic and “civil unrest” leading many advertisers to pause campaigns had both contributed to the decline. While the US, its biggest market, saw a drop of 25% in ad spend.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told investors it’ll likely run subscription “tests” this year (via CNN), though he also said the bar for charging users for aspects of the service would be set “really high”.
So presumably it’s not considering a ‘your first ten tweets are free’ style pay-to-tweet model.
“We want to make sure any new line of revenue is complementary to our advertising business,” CNN reports Dorsey remarking during the investor 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.”
The prospect of a paid version of Twitter — free from trackers, annoying ads and irritating algorithms which meddle with the clean chronology of the timeline — has been a holy grail for certain Twitter addicts since (basically) forever. So plenty of its most fervent users will be watching keenly to see exactly what Founder/CEO Dorsey cooks up.
Twitter casting around for ad revenue diversification looks interesting in light of broader digital privacy trends that have put the ad tracking industry under increasing (and increasingly awkward) scrutiny.
Last week’s massive Twitter security breach also hardly throws a positive light on the company from a privacy perspective. Dorsey addressed the breach in remarks on today’s call, with CNN reporting he apologized to investors — admitting the company “fell behind” on its security obligations.
“We feel terrible about the security incident,” he said. “Security doesn’t have an end point. It’s a constant iteration… We will continue to go above and beyond here as we continue to secure our systems and as we continue to work with external firms and law enforcement.”