Scroll stops in “approximately” 30 days to be part of Twitter Blue

Scroll’s ad-free subscription web service will shut down as an independent entity in “about” 30 days, the company said in an email to subscribers. The service – which was purchased by Twitter earlier this year – will instead be integrated with the booming Twitter Blue premium subscription as “ad-free articles”.

In its current form, Scroll is a $ 5-per-month service that offers ad-free browsing on hundreds of websites, including Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, G / O Media, United States today, and Vox Media – which, to all disclosure, includes The edge. It works by using a combination of third-party cookies and browser extensions to prevent websites from serving ads to paid subscribers.

Scroll was acquired by Twitter in May, when it stopped accepting new registrations while the company worked out its plans for the ad-free service; Today’s announcement that the Scroll service will be added to Twitter Blue seems to provide the answer.

Blue twitter currently offers a variety of bonus features for the service, including an ‘cancel send’ feature to quickly remove your tweets, a bookmark folder for grouping and saving tweets, and a reader mode that converts long threads to a single, cohesive block of text. It also adds some cosmetic tweaks including color themes and custom app icons. But the addition of Scroll’s ad-free service would mark one of the biggest features to come to Twitter Blue yet.

There aren’t many details in Scroll and Twitter’s announcement of what the change will look like, in practice. The two companies have yet to say how existing Scroll customers will switch to Twitter Blue (assuming there is a direct path to switch), when Scroll’s service will be available on Twitter Blue, or even on a specific day when the shutdown of the stand-alone service will be. The company promises more information in the coming weeks.

Picture: Casey newton

Information on pricing and availability is also missing from the news. One of Scroll’s selling points was that its $ 5 per month fee would go (at least in part) to funding subscriber-read journalism: Scroll kept $ 1.50, while the remaining $ 3.50 per month. months were distributed among sites based primarily on how much a reader was reading them.

Twitter has also not said if it will change that price – currently Twitter Blue is only available in Australia and Canada for CA $ 3.49 or AUD $ 4.49, with a presumed price of 2. , $ 99 for the United States. Adding Scroll in its current form to this service without increasing the price would mean a big change in the way sites get paid.

Additionally, Twitter Blue is currently only available in Australia and Canada, which means that unless the service expands significantly over the next month or so, it could be some time before customers Existing Scrolls can retrieve their ad-free experience – assuming Twitter’s implementation of its “ad-free articles” is still the same Scroll experience.