Twitter Acquires Ad-free News Startup, Scroll

Femi Ashekun/

Twitter announced today it had acquired Scroll as part of a future subscription service.

Neither company disclosed the terms of the sale.

Reports say Scroll’s entire 13-person team will move over to Twitter and work to integrate the product into a subscription service to be launched “later in the year”.

In the meantime, Scroll will go into “private beta” and pause all new signups. Current users will however get to continue using the service.

Scroll CEO, Tony Haile, painted a picture of what readers should expect in a blog post announcing the acquisition:

“The mission we’ve been given by Jack and the Twitter team is simple: take the model and platform that Scroll has built and scale it so that everyone who uses Twitter has the opportunity to experience an internet without friction and frustration, a great gathering of people who love the news and pay to sustainably support it.”

The acquisition of Scroll — and, previously, the newsletter company Revue — are part of something called “Longform” taking shape at Twitter.

Twitter’s VP of product, Mike Park, said the new project will give readers “a first-class experience” of “articles, threads and newsletters” both “on and off Twitter.”

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