By: Jefferson Marshall
Following everyone’s favorite celebrities and keeping up with worldwide trending topics might start costing Twitter users as the social media company is considering going premium.
(Wikimedia Commons GageSkidmore)
The premium price would allow access to additional graphs and statistics through Tweetdeck. Although nothing is official yet, the financially-stressed Twitter is searching to recover financially by making the premium fee US$19.99 a month.
“We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions,” Twitter spokeswoman Brielle Villablanca said in a statement Thursday.
“We’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals,” Villablanca said.
The media platform has 319 million users around the globe as of last month. In its 11-year history, most of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising.
However, in the last three months of 2016, Twitter lost $167-million, which was greater than the net loss of $90 million it had during the last few months of 2015.
New York Times reporter Andrew Tavani shows what the new premium Tweetdeck interface could look like in a series of tweets from Wednesday afternoon:
Twitter might build a paid subscription service for power users https://t.co/J1ipEmY9Lj pic.twitter.com/qH0W4dnJ71
— The Verge (@verge) March 23, 2017
2 more notes on ‘advanced TweetDeck’: 1. Monthly subscription fee Twitter is exploring in the survey is $19.99. 2. Complete list of features pic.twitter.com/YEOf9AQ9bt
— Andrew Tavani (@andrewtavani) March 24, 2017
“This premium tool set will provide valuable viewing, posting, and signaling tools like alerts, trends and activity analysis, advanced analytics and composing and posting tools all in one customizable dashboard,” according to a screenshot posted by Tavani on his Twitter page.
Despite these proposed presented features, not everyone is open to having to pay for an app that’s currently free.
“I just feel that that’s [premium Tweetdeck] unnecessary,” said regular Twitter user Deshana Loftman. “Twitter is about tweets, I’m not worried about statistics. I just want to read tweets from the people I’m following.”