The likeliest, and the majority of uninteresting, description is that Twitter is merely developing the infrastructure to check out any of the above choices, and that the platform has no specific strategies since yet. Despite whats going on, though, the reports provided Twitter stock around a 7.34% bump on Wednesday.
The job is called Gryphon and was pointed out in two Twitter job postings for a contract backend Scala software engineer (given that deleted from LinkedIn) and a senior full-stack software engineer. The latter ad describes that Twitter is building a “subscription platform, one that can be reused by other groups in the future,” and that the task will work with Twitter and its Payments group, which deals with advertisement billing:.
We are a new team, codenamed Gryphon. We are constructing a membership platform, one that can be reused by other teams in the future. This is a first for Twitter! Gryphon is a group of web engineers who are closely collaborating with the Payments group and the Twitter.com group. We are looking for a full-stack engineer to lead the Payment and Subscription client work, somebody who values collaboration as much as we do and can serve as a bridge for the engineering team. Its a fantastic opportunity for all teams included!
A Twitter representative informed Gizmodo by means of e-mail that the company wouldnt hide a big announcement in a careers page which it is exploring a series of possible ways to increase profits. Beyond that, theres not a lot to go off of but guesswork.
One apparent possibility is that Twitter merely wishes to charge power users for ad-free accounts or access to advanced analytics, something its reportedly considered in the past and would primarily be of use for corporations, nonprofits, wire service, political or fundraising campaigns, and people who obsessively cultivate their personal brand names. Twitter could also charge for functions like the ability to see numerous customized feeds or personalized informs on trending topics.
This is a very first for Twitter! A spicier speculation is that Twitter is working on a Twitch- or Patreon-style approach for users to charge for access to a whole Twitter feed or particular posts on a public account, or some kind of virtual suggestion jar. Either possibility could have unpredicted effects on Twitters ambiguous culture, to the degree that many of that activity presently happens offsite. Becoming a payments processor would likewise be an extreme modification for Twitter– it presently relies on ad revenue and data licensing to make money.
Image: Andrew Burton (Getty Images).
A spicier speculation is that Twitter is working on a Twitch- or Patreon-style approach for users to charge for access to a whole Twitter feed or particular posts on a public account, or some kind of virtual tip container. Becoming a payments processor would likewise be a radical modification for Twitter– it currently relies on advertisement revenue and information licensing to make money.
That, nevertheless, would be one hell of a pivot. Its likewise easy to see how running membership services through a website where anybody can register anonymously and signing up a new account to evade restrictions is trivial might become a headache for Twitter and create brand-new funding pipelines for prohibited activity (white supremacists) or cybercrime (e.g., the now-classic Elon Musk Bitcoin free gift rip-off).
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Twitter might be finally dealing with a way for you to monetize your shitty tweets without starting a podcast or putting a Cash.me link in your bio– that, or its introducing a brand-new tier of premium or ad-free accounts. As reported by VentureBeat on Wednesday, the revenue-hungry social media network is certainly building some kind of subscription platform.