Scroll will shut down in about 30 days to join Twitter Blue

Scroll will no longer be offered as a stand-alone service

According to an email to customers from the firm, Scroll’s ad-free subscription online service will cease as a separate organisation in roughly 30 days. The service, which was bought by Twitter earlier this year, will now be known as “Ad-Free Articles” and will be included in the expanding Twitter Blue premium subscription.

Scroll is now a $5-per-month subscription service that provides ad-free access to hundreds of websites, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, G/O Media, USA Today, and Vox Media — which includes The Verge, full disclosure. It operates by preventing websites from presenting advertising to paying members via a mix of third-party cookies and browser extensions.

Scroll was purchased by Twitter in May, and the company temporarily halted new sign-ups as it worked out its intentions for the ad-free service; today’s news that Scroll’s service will be included in Twitter Blue appears to be the solution.

Twitter Blue presently has a number of extra features, including a “undo send” tool for rapidly withdrawing tweets – a favourites folder for collecting and storing tweets, and a reader mode for converting long threads into a single, coherent block of text. It also has colour themes and configurable app icons, as well as other aesthetic tweaks. However, the addition of Scroll’s ad-free service would be one of the most significant additions to Twitter Blue.

There aren’t many specifics in Scroll and Twitter’s statement on how the transition will take place. The two firms have yet to specify how existing Scroll subscribers would migrate to Twitter Blue (assuming there is one), when Scroll’s service will be available on Twitter Blue, or even a specific date for the standalone site’s closure. More details will be released in the following weeks, according to the firm.

Besides, there is no mention of pricing or availability in the news. One of Scroll’s selling points was that its $5-per-month charge would go toward financing the journalism that members read: Scroll kept $1.50 each month while the remaining $3.50 was split among sites based on how much a reader read them.

Twitter hasn’t confirmed whether or not the pricing will change. Presently, Twitter Blue is only available in Australia and Canada for $3.49 CAD or $4.49 AUD, with a reported $2.99 price tag for the United States. Adding Scroll to that service in its existing form without boosting the price would result in a significant shift in how websites are compensated.

Furthermore, presently, Twitter Blue is only available in Australia and Canada, which means that if the service doesn’t expand significantly in the next month, it may be some time before existing Scroll customers can reclaim their ad-free experience supposing that Twitter’s implementation of its “Ad-Free Articles” remains same Scroll experience.