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Twitter followed up January’s acquisition of newsletter publishing platform Revue with another foray into the world of journalists, publishers and writers, scooping up Scroll, which enables people to read articles without ads, popups and other distractions.
Scroll works on a membership model and helps readers avoid ads and the like by sharing the proceeds of those memberships with partner sites in exchange for that ad-free experience, counting big names among its partners including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Insider, Mother Jones, The Onion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Root, USA Today and Vox.
Twitter vice president of product Mike Park wrote in a blog post Tuesday, “Scroll has built a way to read articles without the ads, pop-ups and other clutter that get in the way, cleaning up the reading experience and giving people what they want: just the content. Meanwhile, publishers who work with Scroll can bring in more revenue than they would from traditional ads on a page. It’s a better Internet for readers and for writers.”
Park said Twitter plans to incorporate Scroll as part of a subscription offering the social network is currently exploring, explaining, “As a Twitter subscriber, picture getting access to premium features where you can easily read articles from your favorite news outlet or a writer’s newsletter from Revue, with a portion of your subscription going to the publishers and writers creating the content.”
Scroll will temporarily pause new signups during the transition, but Park said the plan is to grow its publisher network once the acquisition is complete.
Twitter will continue to support Scroll’s existing community of customers and publishers, and new publishers interested in joining Scroll can sign up on its website for updates.
Park concluded, “Those who create and consume news know that reading—and, more broadly, journalism—deserve a better future. Scroll will help us build that future, solving one of the most frustrating parts about reading content online. We want to reimagine what they’ve built to deliver a seamless reading experience to our hyper-engaged audiences and allow publishers to deliver cleaner content that can make them more money than today’s business models.”
