When Twitter acquired Scroll, I got a ton of messages from friends, industry peers, and Readup readers. Ironically, it happened just a few days after Readup launched our Subscription offering. Lots of people seemed to think that this was a threat to Readup. I don't see it that way. I never see it that way.
Competition doesn't freak me out. I think Twitter is too broken to fix itself, but, either way, if they genuinely want to try to improve their product for serious readers, that's a good thing.
If you're interested in the future of digital media, read Ben Thompson. He's always right on the money. It's just a bit of a bummer that Ben doesn't know about Readup.... yet. 😉
The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market.
Ben Thompson on Twitter buying Scroll. It's both exciting and frustrating to read things like this. Exciting because this is the exact problem that Readup is vying to solve and frustrating because we're comparatively toiling in borderline anonymity. We're working on solving that problem though now that the subscription machinery is up and running and I'm really bullish on our implementation compared to Scroll and other alternatives.
With the Twitter acquisition it really is a David vs. Goliath situation. Hopefully the metaphor holds all the way through. The overall trends are definitely moving in the right direction. From a follow-up article:
This stuff takes a long time! Simply making subscriptions work at scale was a multi-year affair, and only now are folks starting to push on making subscription markets or thinking about a world where memberships work across sites instead of being completely isolated. I am also extremely excited about this development.
When Twitter acquired Scroll, I got a ton of messages from friends, industry peers, and Readup readers. Ironically, it happened just a few days after Readup launched our Subscription offering. Lots of people seemed to think that this was a threat to Readup. I don't see it that way. I never see it that way.
Competition doesn't freak me out. I think Twitter is too broken to fix itself, but, either way, if they genuinely want to try to improve their product for serious readers, that's a good thing.
If you're interested in the future of digital media, read Ben Thompson. He's always right on the money. It's just a bit of a bummer that Ben doesn't know about Readup.... yet. 😉
Ben Thompson on Twitter buying Scroll. It's both exciting and frustrating to read things like this. Exciting because this is the exact problem that Readup is vying to solve and frustrating because we're comparatively toiling in borderline anonymity. We're working on solving that problem though now that the subscription machinery is up and running and I'm really bullish on our implementation compared to Scroll and other alternatives.
With the Twitter acquisition it really is a David vs. Goliath situation. Hopefully the metaphor holds all the way through. The overall trends are definitely moving in the right direction. From a follow-up article:
Thanks for sharing this and especially thank you for all the hard work in getting the subscription machinery launched.
Rooting for and with RU through & through.