Twitter acquired Scroll, an ad-free news reader product, and said it expects to pull the service into a new subscription offering being planned.
Scroll works with a handful of publishers, including BuzzFeed News, the Atlantic and USA Today, and offers stories from those publishers to paying customers. The stories don’t have ads, and Scroll shares some of the revenue from its subscriptions with the publishers.
Scroll will temporarily halt new subscribers while its 13-person team joins the social media company, Twitter said Tuesday in a blog post. Deal terms weren’t disclosed. Scroll, which has offices in New York City and Portland, is backed by investors including Union Square Ventures.
Twitter has spoken publicly about its interest in selling a subscription product, and is considering a number of options. The San Francisco-based company also recently acquired Revue, a newsletter startup, with plans to make money from subscriptions. Twitter envisions the two products working together, and saids users may one day pay to read newsletters or stories from certain publishers directly on Twitter without any ads.