Twitter Poaches Employees Of Brief, News App Will Wind Down

Twitter will be bringing on the team from news summary app Brief to work on its Space and Explore features, The Verge reported. The Brief team consists of four people.

A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge the social media giant is not buying Brief; it’s just bringing those members on who have worked on the app.

This comes after Twitter purchases of news features, including its May purchase of Scroll, which removes ads from news sites, and its January buy of Revue, a newsletter service, The Verge reported.

The Scroll buy came with a company announcement that the Scroll feature would become a meaningful part of Twitter, which hasn’t materialized yet, according to The Verge.

Twitter also announced that it would be selecting a small group of users to participate in new monetization offerings on the platform, Ticketed Spaces and Super Follows.

Ticketed Spaces allows users to set a fee of $1 to $999 for access to a social audio room. That also comes with extra functions, such as putting a room size limit in place. Super Follows, meanwhile, allows users to pay fees of either $9.99, $4.99 or $2.99 to see exclusive content.

Those taking part in the new group testing the features will retain 97 percent of the funds they generate, after the charge Android or iOS takes.

But Twitter said it will be raising the fee to 20 percent if users end up bringing in a total of $50,000 on both platforms.

In addition, Twitter has been testing full screen ads for its new Fleets feature.

Fleet ads are like “full-screen billboards” and will roll out with a chosen group of advertisers as a pilot. There will only be a small number of U.S. users who see them at first. Twitter, with this feature, is looking at boosting its advertisements.