SOCIAL
Twitter Launches Paid Weather News Service as it Moves into Subscription Content
Twitter is launching its first official paid newsletter service this week with a new weather news offering called ‘Tomorrow‘, which will provide up to date weather information and insights for a monthly fee.
Incorporating Twitter’s recently acquired Revue newsletter tools, as well as the platform’s growing range of creator monetization options, like ticketed Spaces, Tomorrow will provide weather information for specific regions, catering to a common usage of the platform, in keeping up to date with the latest events.
The project will be lead by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, who will work with a collective of climate experts to offer local weather insights, starting with a small group of US states.
As explained by Holthaus:
“We’ll be doing local newsletters, drop-in audio chats during times of scary weather, original journalism focused on climate justice, and a paid service that will let people ask unlimited questions. It’s a revolutionary weather service for a revolutionary moment in history.”
The project will start with insights for 16 states, but Holthaus plans to expand his team over time to cover more regions, before eventually branching into other nations where Twitter usage is high, many of which don’t provide access to in-depth weather resources of this type.
At launch, Tomorrow will cost members $10 per month, which, as per the Tomorrow website, will give subscribers:
- Ability to ask our team of meteorologists unlimited weather and climate questions with a guaranteed response
- A members-only weekly newsletter, with uncut interviews
- Early access to podcast episodes and original longform journalism
- Discounts on Tomorrow merch and other members-only perks
- 1% of all member revenue will used to support Environmental Justice organizations. The more members we have, the bigger the impact
It’s an interesting first-up project for the Twitter/Revue partnership, which Twitter also notes focuses on establishing a writer ‘collective’ for monetization, which is an element that it’s keen to explore further in other niches. That essentially turns a project like Tomorrow into a more traditional publishing model, with a main banner brand, then various journalists and experts signing on to collectively create a more comprehensive offering, and sharing the revenue amongst the group, as opposed to each writer going the solo newsletter route.
Revue has worked with various collectives of this type, and is working to establish more publication groups to build out better subsctiption offerings, which could provide a more sustainable funding model for original journalism via direct funding.
As such, it’ll be interesting to see how Tomorrow is received, and whether the integration with Twitter can facilitate a broader reaching, more profitable model for indepdendent journalism.
Essentially, it’s an alternative take on the regular media business model, but on a smaller, more direct scale, and without establishing a reliance on ads. Whether that can sustain more niche offerings like this is the key question, and also, what then happens when they reach a certain scale.
Some interesting questions, and the experiment could showcase a new pathway for creators on the platform.