Twitter Acquires Scroll
• Three months after it bought the newsletter platform Revue, Twitter is acquiring yet another subscription-based service: Scroll, described by Fast Company as “a news reader that lets you enjoy internet content without all those pesky, invasive, energy-sucking digital ads.”
The two companies announced the deal Tuesday morning. In a blog post, Twitter’s VP of Product Mike Parksaid, “This is an exciting opportunity for us to introduce this proven model to publishers on our service and make reading the news better for everyone involved. Looking ahead, Scroll will become a meaningful addition to our subscriptions work as we build and shape a future subscription service on Twitter.”
Fast Company says that Scroll, led by former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, is “essentially like a cable company for digital news. It lets you subscribe to a bundle of publications — sites ranging from The Atlantic and USA Todayto BuzzFeed and Vox — and then it strips their articles of advertising for a more frictionless experience.”
In a series of tweets, Haile said being acquired by Twitter will help Scroll scale up its operations and make its business model more sustainable. He also praised Twitter’s dedication to journalism relative to other large social media platforms, noting that it’s more dependent on journalists than its rivals. “Every journalist that loses their job, every newsroom sold to unworthy owners diminishes the great conversation of which we are a part,” Haile tweeted. “That is why, when Twitter approached us about accelerating our mission we began to get very excited.” Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
