Elon Musk says Twitter will roll out a new “more expensive” Blue subscription that will not show ads on the platform. The current $7.99 per month Twitter Blue plan promises 50 percent fewer ads compared to “unverified people,” though this feature hasn’t been rolled out yet.
We still don’t know how much the ad-free tier will cost or when it will launch, and Twitter no longer has a communications team to contact. The existing Blue plan comes with benefits such as a blue “verified” checkmark, the ability to undo tweets, a way to upload longer 1080p videos, a thread reading mode, and priority ranking in conversations.
This comes just days after Twitter quietly placed a ban on third-party clients, such as Tweetbot and Twitterific. On Thursday, the company updated its developer agreement to note that developers cannot use Twitter’s API to “create or attempt to create a replacement or similar service or product for the Twitter applications.”
As my colleague Mitchell Clark points out, although some developers pay to access Twitter’s API, Twitter doesn’t serve ads on it, preventing the company from generating ad revenue. Additionally, people using third-party apps may not see the need to purchase a Twitter Blue subscription, as some already offer an enhanced (and sometimes ad-free) Twitter experience.
