Longer Tweets To Help Twitter Inc With More Publisher Deals

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Twitter plans to do away with the 140-character limit under CEO Jack Dorsey’s leadership. It is working on a feature to allow users to share longer tweets, which could go up to 10,000 characters, and this may have big consequences for publishers, says a report from Re/code.

Longer tweets to help Twitter and publishers

According to Dorsey, the expanded tweet length will be beneficial to regular users as now they will not have to share images of text to work around the current limit. In reality, the news may not matter much to the average Twitter user as they may not ever make a tweet that is 10,000 characters long.

However, the new format definitely seems very useful for publishers like The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, the report says. With expanded tweets, publishers will get a chance to run stories directly on Twitter, similar to what they do now with Facebook’s Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover and Apple News. Now Twitter will no longer have to persuade publishers to publish their content on its platform. Their readership will also increase if their content is handed over to Twitter.

More importantly, it will help the micro-blogging firm to host content on its platform and not just links to content. The number of people who see publisher tweets is way higher than those who actually click on their links. Hosting content will help the micro-blogging firm keep users inside of Twitter instead of clicking to venture off to other websites.

More revenues from the same users

On Tuesday, Adam Bain, Twitter COO and revenue boss, spoke to Peter Kafka of Re/code in an interview in which he didn’t dismiss the idea.

“It’s an interesting way to look at it. We certainly have been helping content companies today bring video content closer to consumers.”

He noted twice that Twitter and publishers are working “together” on revenue generation. Twitter’s user growth has flattened basically, and this means the company is required to come up with new ways to make more money from the same pool of people already using the service. The micro-blogging firm has done this successfully over the past year. The company’s revenue for Q3 jumped by 58% over the previous year despite user growth of around 11%.

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