Twitter Blue subscription launches in Australia, Canada ↦
Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more 🔥.
A handful of assorted premium features, including bookmark folders (meh), undo-able tweets (ooh), a better thread reader (hmmm), and customizable app icons (¯_(ツ)_/¯). It’s launching in Canada and Australia first, for $3.49 CAD/$4.49 AUD per month, with more countries to come.
This has been rumored for a while, with Twitter feature sleuth Jane Manchun Wong first posting about it a few weeks back, including a supposed U.S. price tag of $2.99/month, which is pretty squarely in between those international prices.
Twitter making a play for direct subscription revenue isn’t surprising, given that everybody seems to be getting into the direct payment sphere, and this is essentially free money for the company.
But what is interesting is one thing that you won’t get with Twitter Blue: an ad-free experience. Advertising is still the biggest chunk of Twitter’s revenue, and they’re not going to replace that with direct subscriptions anytime soon.
It’ll be interesting to see what the pickup of this is: undo-able tweets seems like the most attractive part of the package; it’s not quite the long sought-after Edit button, but it’s the closest there is right now, and I imagine some will feel miffed that it’s behind a paywall—though others will be all too happy to shell out for the feature.
Twitter says it’ll add more features to Twitter Blue in months to come. There is currently no date for its launch in the U.S.
