Publishers Using Twitter Blue Is Not Just About Money

If you ask publishers, the unofficial motto of Twitter Blue is: Come for the revenue share, stay for everything else. Since debuting on Nov. 9, the $2.99 subscription service has enticed more than 300 U.S. publishers to participate in its inaugural launch, luring them in with a variety of perks. The most widely publicized, its revenue share program, aims to earn publishers 50% more revenue per person than they would make from serving ads. But the boosted revenue is not the only reason publishers flocked to the service, sources told Adweek. Instead, a raft of other benefits—including more sophisticated data and a transparent payout framework—help shore up the value proposition of Twitter Blue. These factors helped sign up publishers like The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, who passed on its product predecessor, Scroll. “While we expect that the paid readership from Twitter Blue will more than offset the revenue we would have generated from digital advertising from the relevant page views, that is not our primary focus,” said Lee Fentress, evp of business development and commerce at the Los Angeles Times. Facebook Begins Testing New News Feed Controls for Advertisers, Users Twitter Blue comes amid a years-long souring of relations between publishers and platforms, where the former have foregone revenue, audience data and relationships for access to scale. But the service could represent a break from that dynamic. By partnering with publishers in a transparent fashion, enhancing their data and offering prior evidence of the model’s viability, Twitter Blue gives publishers more reason to buy in, even if only on an experimental basis. Driving more revenue than ads In exchange for $2.99 per month, Twitter Blue members get ad-free access to content from more than 300 participating publishers, along with other perks like an undo tweet button. It does not bypass paywalls, however. Twitter Blue revenue depends on metrics like time spent. Every Blue member can see where their money goes on a chart that shows their impact in funding journalism. The service claims publishers can make 50% more per person than they would have made from serving ads, a revenue lift Scroll was able to produce, according to publishers that used the product. Sources wouldn't share their revenue estimates. Publishers own the interaction With Twitter Blue, all of the user action happens on the publisher’s site, said Tony Haile, senior director of product at Twitter and the founder of Scroll, so publishers own the performance data. “We are interested in the usage data and metrics that will not only inform our partnership with Twitter, but also provide us insight into what readers are looking for––and reading––as we continue to grow digital subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times,” Fentress told Adweek. As the service evolves, Twitter Blue aims to find new ways to provide publishers with the information they want while maintaining the privacy rights of our members, Haile said. Scroll 2.0 plus added scale Scroll pioneered the model of providing readers an ad-free reading experience subsidized by a revenue share, a key reason Twitter acquired the product in May. Several publishers that used Scroll publicly stated that they were surpassing the 50% goal, and almost all of the publishers in the Scroll network came across to Twitter Blue, Haile said. Backed by Twitter, the ad-free reading experience can scale much more effectively than it could as a standalone product, potentially leading to even higher revenues for participating publishers, said Peter Doucette, the CRO of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I look at Twitter Blue as, for lack of a better term, Scroll 2.0,” Doucette told Adweek. “But now it has the ability to reach a much bigger, really engaged user base on Twitter.” Twitter has nearly 37 million users in the U.S., making the total addressable market for Twitter Blue substantial. However, the features the service offers cater more to super users and news junkies, so its target audience will be small. Sources wouldn't share how many subscribers Twitter Blue might generate. Transparent payment structure Compared to similar publisher-platform offerings from Facebook, Google and Apple, Twitter Blue pays publishers using a model that is transparent to all parties, including readers, said Matthew Ingram, the chief digital writer at Columbia Journalism Review. News-consumption products from platforms have historically been “black boxes,” Ingram said. But Twitter Blue is far more quantifiable, and the data is available to everyone involved. “Twitter Blue feels like a different approach entirely,” Ingram said. “Platform relationships in the past have typically just been, ‘We give you money.’ This feels far more tied to reader activity.” Less at stake Twitter referrals make up a small portion of most publishers' traffic, 1.6% of referral traffic compared with Facebook's 24.1%, per Parsely, making it easier to experiment with the platform. This fact is not something that Twitter might trumpet, but it does give publishers great agency to tinker with the platform because there are fewer readers at stake. However, if Twitter Blue increases the value of that audience, publishers might prioritize the platform a little more. Correction: Adweek mistakenly stated the number of Twitter's monthly active U.S. users as 70 million. Twitter has 37 million monthly active U.S. users.

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Why Publishers' Adoption of Twitter Blue Is About More Than the Money

The partnership marks a departure from the typical platform-publisher dynamic

Mark Stenberg

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