This will not be to the liking of many Twitter users.
Apparently, based on a mention in the back-end code of the app, TweetDeck, Twitter’s own tweet management platform, will soon become a Twitter Blue exclusive feature, meaning that only paying Twitter users will be able to access the app.
As you can see in this code snippet, posted by Twitter Takeover News, Twitter looks to be preparing to launch TweetDeck as a Twitter Blue add-on feature, which would help to build out the Twitter Blue offering, in the hopes of luring more users into the monthly subscription program.
And Twitter Blue needs all the help it can get. Data analysis shows that Twitter Blue currently has around 300,000 paying subscribers, which is nowhere near the numbers that Elon Musk and Co..would need to make Twitter Blue a viable solution to its bot problems or its revenue needs.
For context, in order for Twitter Blue to contribute 50% of Twitter’s overall revenue, which was Musk’s stated aim for the project, Twitter would need around 33 million paying subscribers, a massive jump on what it’s seen thus far.
Twitter will still see more growth – just this week, it’s expanded Twitter Blue into more regions, while it’ll also soon launch its ‘Verification for Organizations’ program, and remove ‘legacy’ blue ticks.
All of these, you would assume, will see more people signing up to Twitter Blue – but even then, it’s unlikely to be able to reach those lofty targets, and become a significant element, unless Twitter can seriously boost interest.
Would making TweetDeck Twitter Blue exclusive help in this respect?
TweetDeck is a popular tweet management platform, used by many people, and many of them would likely consider paying $8 to keep accessing it. But at the same time, TweetDeck has been largely ignored by Twitter for too long, and many of its features are stale or outdated.
Though it is, in my opinion, Twitter’s best approach. There’s a wide array of third party tweet management tools available, which many people pay third-party providers for. If Twitter could build better, natively integrated versions of the same, with additional analytics tools and features that can’t be included in any other app, that could be a revenue winner.
Given its more recent moves, Twitter might also look to cut off competing platforms from its API, which would give it even more impetus, and push more users towards a Blue subscription. That would be a drastic move, but amid the various updates and changes being made at Twitter 2.0 right now, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this is something that it’s considering.
That could, then, make TweetDeck a much more significant element of the Twitter Blue experience, and a much bigger consideration.
We don’t have much to go on at this stage, as Twitter doesn’t have a comms department to ask, but it could be another element to watch in the evolving Twitter 2.0 saga.