It looks like Twitter may be working on a new subscription platform as reported by The Verge. A new job listing for a reveals that the social media company has a new team codenamed “Gryphon”.
With all the work Twitter is currently doing to tackle misinformation and hate speech a new subscription platform is quite an undertaking. The company has also had to apologize and work to fix the data breach of business customers in recent weeks.
New subscription platform coming to Twitter
A subscription service would be a first for the company. However, it is in no way clear how Twitter would implement this and what it would look like.
Twitter makes most of its revenue through ad sales and data licensing. However, a subscription platform which gives users access to exclusive content could be another fruitful revenue stream.
The job listing is looking for a web engineer to join this mysterious codenamed team “Gryphon”. The job description reveals that the company is looking to set up a new subscription service. However, it does not offer any details on what the project would actually entail.
This would not be the first time that Twitter has flirted with the idea of a subscription service. Back in 2018, the company ran a survey asking users their views on paying firs certain types of content.
These included new analytics, breaking news alerts, or information about what an account’s followers are tweeting about.
It is possible that the company is looking at a Twitch/Patreon style of subscription service. This would mean that users could subscribe to individual accounts somehow. Thus far Twitter is yet to comment on the news but that could change in the near future.
Twitter changes job listing then restores it
Unsurprisingly the job listing by Twitter caused some significant discussion online. This prompted the company to change it to remove all mention of a subscription service. It also removed all mention of team “Gryphon”. This left the listing somewhat bare.
Instead, the listing simply described a job for a web engineer that would “work on a bevy of backend engineering teams”. Clearly, those at Twitter felt they had let the cat out the bag on this one.
However, shortly after the job description was restored to its former self. This is probably because the description was now so vague that it did not represent the job the company was advertising.
Twitter definitely wants to keep its subscription service a secret until the company is ready to announce something. However, in its recruitment process, the company may have let slip what is going on.