Twitter announces paid Super Follows so you can bill tweets

Twitter today announced two big upcoming features: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based on specific interests. These are two of the biggest changes to Twitter in quite some time, but they also fit neatly into models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms.

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to bill followers and provide them with access to additional content. This could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, a newsletter subscription, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $ 4.99 per month to receive a series of benefits. Twitter sees it as a way to allow creators and publishers to be paid directly by their fans.

Direct payment tools have become increasingly important to creators especially in recent years. Patreon has seen huge success, and other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and even GitHub have all launched direct payment features for creators. Twitter is likely to take a cut – the company has hinted at subscription features that would give it a new revenue stream – although it doesn’t appear to have said what those fees will be yet.

Image: Twitter.

Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appears to be its version of something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests – like cats or plants, Twitter suggests – allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation issue as well), and they could be a particularly useful tool on Twitter, as the open nature of the service can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform. .

There is no timeline for any of these features to launch yet. Twitter listed them as “what’s next” for its platform in a presentation to analysts and investors this afternoon.