Published , by Asif Khan
Published , by Asif Khan
Twitter's stock jumped 11% today on reports that the company is working on a paid subscription service. Codename Gryphon is apparently already being worked on at Twitter. Shacknews Mercury certainly sounds cooler, to be honest.
Here's what the job listing on Twitter originally read, as reported by CNBC:
“We are building a subscription platform, one that can be reused by other teams in the future. This is a first for Twitter! Gryphon is a team of web engineers who are closely collaborating with the Payments team and the Twitter.com team."
Twitter (TWTR) certainly needs to do something to better monetize their platform, so the news today is being positively welcomed by shareholders. The company's first quarter of 2020 revenues were flat year-over-year. A successful paid version of Twitter would actually be the answer to a lot of the company's problems, as they have struggled to be consistently profitable like its competitor Facebook.
Shacknews implemented our Mercury subscription service after removing programmatic advertisements from the site in 2018. While, I will readily admit to a rocky start, Mercury has increased our annual revenues by 300% when compared to our ad revenue in 2017. If Twitter is half as lucky as Shacknews, this could be a good thing for shareholders. The key difference between Shacknews Mercury and Twitter "Gryphon" is that we actually have a community that wants to support us. I am not sure a paid version of Twitter will be as well-received by their user base.
I shouldn't judge. Shacknews is still not profitable. This is a challenge that many websites face in 2020, and it will be very interesting to see how this subscription service plays out at Twitter. For today, Twitter shareholders are being rewarded by the money printer.