Twitter Blue is the company’s subscription service that offers additional features to paying members. So far, these features have included bookmark folders, tweet undos, and reader mode, but Twitter has added some new features and expanded the service to more countries.
It launched back in June, only for Canada and Australia on iOS, but they just expanded to the US and New Zealand as well as Android and web.
One of the features that was added is ad-free articles, which hides ads from participating websites and gives a portion of the Twitter Blue revenue to them. Think of it like ethical ad-blocking or YouTube Premium but for websites.
This video illustrates how ad-free articles would work. It would still open the article on the app itself, but it would filter out the ads to provide a better reading experience.
This feature was actually taken from Scroll, a service that Twitter acquired earlier this year. Scroll offered the same feature with more than 300 websites participating, providing a more pleasant reading experience for its users. Currently, only US based publications are able to participate, but Twitter is hoping to expand that soon.
Interestingly, you will still run into paywalls with ad-free articles. For example, if you want to read Washington Post ad-free, you would have to subscribe to both Washington Post and Twitter Blue to do so. Twitter said they do not support “paywall access right now”, but we might see that change in the future.
Unfortunately, Twitter Blue subscribers still have to see ads, and Twitter said that they are not currently considering a Twitter ads-free product.
Twitter Blue is also adding a Top Articles feature, which gathers the most-shared articles from the people you follow and displays them, updating every 24 hours. This feature was previously called Nuzzel and was also taken from Scroll. The Top Articles will be shown on your Twitter page, but are only available for Android and web right now. Twitter says that this feature will come to iOS very soon.
In addition, Twitter is adding a way to customise your navigation bar, allowing you to pin your most used pages to the bar. This will only be available for iOS at the moment, with no mention of adding it to Android or web yet.
Unfortunately, Twitter Blue is not available in Malaysia, as it is only available in the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Even though there is no local pricing yet, the US version costs USD 2.99 (about RM12.41) per month, so we can expect it to cost around that much.
