How much are you willing to pay to correct a typo, a grammatical error or a word that should have remained unspoken? Twitter thinks $2.99 a month should be fine. The company has rolled out Twitter Blue in the US and New Zealand across iOS, Android and web (earlier this year it was introduced in Australia and Canada). The idea is to show that Twitter is listening to the concerns of its users.
What do you exactly get with the new paid monthly subscription? Ad-free articles (formerly known as Scroll), top articles, themes, bookmark folders, customisable navigation, an “undo button” for Tweets, a “Reader” mode for reading threads and Twitter Blue Labs for early access features, including longer videos and pinned DMs.
Obviously, the one which is attracting most attention is undo tweet, which lets people set a 30-second timer before the tweet gets posted so they can revise typos or any other mistakes. Twitter’s blog post says: “We’ve been listening to and learning from the most passionate and vocal people on Twitter as to what will make their experience more customisable, more frictionless, and simply put — better.” Of course, this is better but limiting changes to customers who are willing to pay quite a hefty amount ($2.99) per month appears to be an eye-on-cash move.
Lately, the platform has been introducing a lot of features that have been highly appreciated, like Spaces and the integration with editorial newsletter tool Revue but this new move is something customers have been asking for years. Gmail too allows you to unsend a mail for a few seconds but there is no extra charge involved.
Yes, paying for the ad-free articles feature makes sense. In the US, you can read stories from The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and others without advertisements. Plus, a piece of your subscription fee goes directly to these sites. That’s welcome. Also, welcome is reader for threads. Long threads are now easier to read because of the new Reader Mode. But the question remains, is $2.99 too much? The Twitter we know is still available and free to use and Twitter Blue is an opt-in service. Hopefully the paid service will eventually spread to other countries and — fingers crossed — maybe with different pricing tiers.
