Twitter seems to be working on some sort of subscription service model. A job listing on Twitter Careers is looking for a senior software engineer for a new project called Gryphon.
“We are a new team, codenamed Gryphon. We are building a subscription platform, one that can be reused by other teams in the future. This is a first for Twitter! Gryphon is a team of web engineers who are closely collaborating with the Payments team and the Twitter.com team. We are looking for a full-stack engineer to lead the Payment and Subscription client work.”
Twitter Careers
Twitter, as anyone would expect, didn’t reveal what it is exactly they were going to use this subscription service for. Their business makes money from ad revenue and data licensing. So to make the move to a subscription based service means we can speculate as to what they may intend to hide behind a paywall.
In an interesting twist, Twitter may have tried to cover their tracks. In a tweet by Matthew Keys, they changed the listing to
“Work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users”
Despite the cat and mouse game, word is already out, and we know that something is in the works.
This could be an angle at exclusive content, for example YouTube not so long ago introduced YouTube Red. Offering original content and benefits like an ad free experience.
Now I’m not saying that Twitter could move into this arena. The transition for YouTube was a little more natural because they had a lot of content creators on their platform they could easily enlist into making content for YouTube Red.
On the other hand, nothing is really out of the realm of possibility these days.
I guess like with most things we will have to wait and see…
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