News has started bubbling about Twitter acquiring Scroll, a service that allowed users to pay a subscription to remove ads from popular content sites. Scroll also owns Nuzzel, a popular news service that shares stories that people in your Twitter timeline are sharing. Cool. But what does that have to do with Portland exactly?
Scroll’s cofounder and CTO, Kushal Dave, lives in Portland. As do three other folks on the Scroll team.
So what does Twitter have planned for Scroll?
Those who create and consume news know that reading – and more broadly, journalism – deserve a better future. Scroll will help us build that future, solving one of the most frustrating parts about reading content online. We want to reimagine what they’ve built to deliver a seamless reading experience to our hyper-engaged audiences and allow publishers to deliver cleaner content that can make them more money than today’s business models.
To do this, we plan to include Scroll as part of an upcoming subscription offering we’re currently exploring. As a Twitter subscriber, picture getting access to premium features where you can easily read articles from your favorite news outlet or a writer’s newsletter from Revue, with a portion of your subscription going to the publishers and writers creating the content.
This isn’t the first Twitter acquisition that had a Portland connection. In 2008, they picked up Rael Dornfest by acquiring Values of n. In 2013, they picked up Lucky Sort, which analyzed trends and patterns in written content.
For more information, see the Twitter blog post about the Scroll acquisition.
