A paid version of Twitter Blue

Twitter on Thursday said it had launched its paid version of Twitter Blue, which gives the ability to edit or delete a tweet within 30 seconds of it being posted and other features for ease of use.

Twitter (TWTR) on Thursday finally unveiled its first subscription service, a move long anticipated by market experts. Twitter Blue will be available to users in Canada for $2.89 a month and Australia for $3.45. The company has not announced any timeline on plans to launch the service in other countries.

According to Twitter's press release, users of the paid version will get the following features:

• Form bookmark folders to organise tweets by topic.
• The ability to edit or delete a tweet within 30 seconds of publication (a feature long requested by all users).
• "Read mode" for easy reading of long chains of messages.
• Dedicated customer support.
• Settings for in-app colour themes and the Twitter app icon itself on the screen of the device being used.

The head of Twitter Blue believes its target audience is the most active out of 200 million daily Twitter users: journalists, social network managers, etc.

However, the subscription service is a move by Twitter to generate additional revenue streams, as currently about 86 percent of its total revenue comes from advertisers.

Twitter should not be compared with social media giant Facebook (FB), but if we compare it with Snap (SNAP), which is more similar in terms of revenue generation, Twitter loses out both in the number of users and its growth rate and improved monetisation.

For example, in Twitter's most recent reported quarter for the first three months of 2021, its revenue grew 28%, with the addition of 7 million monetisable daily users less than analysts on average expected.

In the same period, Snap increased revenues by 66% and increased the number of global active users (DAU) by 22% from last year's figure to 280 million, which was above analysts' forecast of 275 million.

Twitter recently added the ability for users to pay tips to tweet authors and launched a trial of full-screen vertical ads in the US with the "Fleets" disappearing message feature. Such ads can attract more attention from users and give better conversion rates.