Twitter toying with $20 fee for 'power users'

Brands, businesses and so-called ‘power users’ could soon be paying to access some of Twitter’s premium features.

The social media service, which allows any user to publicly share short messages of up to 140 characters, along with images, videos and other content, was still struggling to return any decent financial results after almost a decade online.

Now, according to a survey sent to a number of users, it was seeking feedback on what it called an “advanced TweetDeck”.

TweetDeck is an existing, free application owned by Twitter that allows heavy users of the service - including businesses and brands - to curate and create their Twitter content with more flexibility than the standard Twitter interface.

Twitter purchased TweetDeck from its third-party developers for $40m in 2011.

The survey was first spotted by journalist Andrew Tavani, who posted screenshots of it on Twitter itself.

It appeared Twitter was exploring a monthly service fee of $19.99, and had included a list of possible features in the survey.

Twitter, which floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013, but recent results showed it lost $167m in the last three months of 2016.

It was also struggling with a small user base of just 319 million monthly active users, compared to 1.23 billion daily active users of Facebook - its primary rival in the social advertising space - in December.