Twitter Inc.
is ending the ability of subscribers of its paid Twitter Blue product to access ad-free articles from publishers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitter Blue is a roughly year-old monthly subscription that offers premium features, such as an “undo tweet” option and access to ad-free articles from hundreds of publishers, including Vox, Los Angeles Times and Insider.
The move comes as the company’s new owner, Tesla Inc. Chief Executive
Elon Musk,
makes sweeping changes from high-profile firings to product updates since closing the $44 billion deal last week. Tuesday morning,
Sarah Personette,
Twitter’s chief customer officer, said on Twitter that she resigned on Friday.
Twitter is planning additional changes to its Blue subscriber offering, including raising the price to $19.99 from $4.99, according to internal company correspondence viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Users who want to remain verified by Twitter, a feature that confirms users with a blue check on their account, will need to subscribe to the upgraded program within a 90-day period, the correspondence shows, and the goal is to launch the changes by Nov. 7. Verification wasn’t previously a perk of the Blue subscription. The Verge previously reported some of the changes to Twitter Blue.
On Sunday, Mr. Musk tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”
Before the deal’s completion, Mr. Musk’s team told investors of a plan for improving the platform that included bolstering its subscription offerings to become less reliant on advertisers, said
Ross Gerber,
chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management. The Santa Monica, Calif., investment firm put up under $1 million as an outside investor in Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover, he said.
Twitter had described the ad-free feature as a way for publishers to earn more on a per-reader basis than they would from advertising.
The program never accrued enough subscribers to have a meaningful impact on publishers’ revenue, according to executives at participating publishers. Publishers were paid based on subscriber consumption, they said.
Twitter is the latest platform to unwind an offering meant to support publishers.
Publishers have long criticized large technology platforms, especially
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google and
Meta Platforms Inc.’s
Facebook, for not paying for news content. The tech companies each responded with programs meant to compensate publishers. Meta recently said it is no longer investing in its news efforts, ending sizable payments to some publishers, and Google’s Showcase product for publishers has yet to launch in the U.S.
Write to Alexandra Bruell at [email protected] and Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]
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