I’m excited about today’s Twitter news for several reasons. In addition to what Fischer describes above, mock-ups of Super Follows showed a creator charging $4.99 a month for features including “deals & discounts” and “community access.” Twitter also said it's experimenting with putting other features behind a paywall, including its Tweetdeck portal that allows hyper-engaged Twitter users to monitor lots of tweets in real-time. The product will allow Twitter users to charge for premium content, like a newsletter subscription, badges showing support, or bonus tweets. Twitter announced it will create a new feature that allows users to charge their followers for more content via a payment tool called 'Super Follows.'

The strategy that got everyone’s attention, though, was a move to introduce a paywall for certain tweets. And further investments in automatically generated “topics,” launched last year, will make it easier for new and casual users to build an interest graph - and for Twitter to serve targeted ads to them. A forthcoming “Communities” feature will introduce the idea of Facebook-style groups to the service. New automated blocking and muting tools will make Twitter a more welcoming place, particularly for women and underrepresented groups. Twitter executives offered a variety of strategies Thursday for reaching these goals. Twitter said in its last earnings report it had 192 million mDAUs in Q4 2020. This is the first time Twitter has set long-term goals for revenue and daily users and it comes ahead of the company’s analyst day on Thursday afternoon. The announcement was made in an SEC filing. Twitter said Thursday it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.

On Thursday Twitter held an event for analysts, and like Snap before it, the company is betting that good times are here to stay. Today let’s talk about Twitter’s move into subscriptions, and some of the more unpredictable effects it might have on the media landscape.

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