Twitter is in a hurry to make money, and in another move that could potentially lead to some revenue, it’s expanded the Twitter Blue subscription to six new countries. The paid plans are now available in Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, making a total of 12 regions for users to subscribe to.
The company is also launching a new Spaces tab with curated stations for live and recorded spaces, along with podcasts. Users without a Twitter Blue subscription already have access to the Spaces tab, but it mainly shows what live audio sessions are currently in progress.
Twitter is also bringing back themed stations with a list of Spaces stations by topic. The company started testing it in August before Musk took over. But in recent months, Spaces has had almost no curation due to the layoffs. Now the social network may rely on algorithms to group related real-time audio conversations together.
The social network makes podcasts available only to Blue subscribers and “some people on Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Android apps.” Podcasts were also integrated into Twitter in the pre-Musk era, but the company appears to be resuming work on some of those projects. Twitter said it won’t be able to search for podcasts at first. So you will have to listen to what the algorithm serves you.
Twitter Blue’s expansion isn’t surprising as the company is looking to generate more revenue by any means necessary. Last month, the social media company enabled people on Android to subscribe. On Thursday, Twitter announced it was discontinuing free access to its API and will roll out a basic paid plan next week. While the company didn’t reveal the price tag, Elon Musk tweeted those basic plans might cost $100 a month – which can be steep for some independent developers, students and researchers.
While the company has recorded declining ad revenue, the good news for Musk is that numerous companies, including PepsiCo and Anheuser-Busch InBev, are reportedly pledged millions of dollars for Superbowl takeover ads on Twitter. Last month, the social network partnered with ad technology company DoubleVerify Integral Ad Science (IAS) to notify marketers if their ads appear next to inappropriate tweets.
