As Clubhouse grows in popularity and appeals to more celebrities, Twitter is now bringing its own version of audio lounges, Spaces, to more users. Launched as a trial last December, Spaces can now be initiated by any user with 600 or more followers and be followed by all platform users. Twitter announced the opening of this feature to more users on May 3.
While Clubhouse wants to be ultra-select with a principle of sponsorship and invitations, Twitter is accelerating the availability of Spaces and relying on several new features. On the one hand, the audio lounge (developed by the teams from the start-up Breaker) is intended to be more accessible and offers subtitling, so that “people who are deaf or hard of hearing, or those who prefer it, can follow the conversations“, indicated the company.
Towards the monetization of Spaces
Ultimately, Twitter also plans to monetize the service by allowing “in the coming months“users to offer Paid Spaces. Hosts will be able to decide the price of access to their audio lounges as well as the number of tickets available. Twitter specifies that the”majority“Revenue from tickets will go directly to hosts without providing further details.Small party“of the sum.
It appears that Twitter is targeting conferences and other online concerts, according to the illustrations in his blog post. In general, paid content trots in the minds of its developers. At its last annual meeting, the platform declared “to explore“Features more focused on influencers and creators who want to monetize their followers. She notably mentioned a system of tips and”super follow“.
Ticketed Spaces: we’re working on a way for hosts to be rewarded for the experiences they create and for listeners to have exclusive access to the convos they care about most. soon, we’ll test ticketed Spaces with a small group where hosts can set ticket prices and quantity pic.twitter.com/uHxxvmo3wC
- Spaces (@TwitterSpaces) May 3, 2021
No details have yet been given on how the tip might work, but one of Twitter’s design executives, Dantley Davis, has suggested that the feature is linked to the company’s evolution towards the long format content, following the acquisition of the newsletter company Revue.
With these new features, Twitter hopes to take the lead on Clubhouse. The rival application, founded in 2020 by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has already been offering paid lounges for a few months and has attracted a fairly substantial VIP list, like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, or even Drake. But Twitter intends to reverse the situation. The social network will also offer space management functions, with upstream programming as well as co-hosted spaces.
