Because of the fact that Twitter’s advertising business is struggling, the social media company has started looking at other ways they could make money.
According to photos posted to Twitter of a survey the company is running to gauge people’s interest, Twitter has been exploring a version of its Tweetdeck app that focuses on paid subscriptions. This was first reported in the news by the Verge on Thursday.
“We’re conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we’re exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
It’s safe to assume that if Twitter does decide to roll out a paid version of the app, it could mimic other freemium services, such as Spotify, where there is are free and paid tiers that can access the same content. But customers who pay get extra goodies, like an ad-free experience.
Currently, Tweetdeck is ad-free, but new features cited in the survey include a mobile version of Tweetdeck, the ability to bookmark content for later, an option to import user lists, a view of who checked out your profile page or unfollowed you, priority customer support access and advanced analytics tools.
Right now it seems this is all strictly in the exploration stage. There’s just s much of a chance that Twitter could decide not to roll out a subscription tier. But based on Twitter’s recent struggles to grow its advertising revenue, along with the fact that Twitter isn’t deriving any direct revenue from the people using the currently ad-free TweedDeck app on their computers, it just as likely could.