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Twitter Wants To Hear Your Voice

This article is more than 2 years old.

Twitter’s TWTR experiment with audio is evolving, and it’s now widely rolling out its live voice-chat rooms, Spaces, to mobile app users.

Starting Monday Anyone with 600 or more followers can host a conversation on Spaces, and Twitter next plans to introduce the ability to charge access to Spaces, part of a broad plan to give users ways to earn money from establishing fanbases on Twitter.

Written tweets remain the beating heart of Twitter, but the 14-year-old company is eager to expand beyond, a course change after many years of slow product development. In the last year, it has launched Fleets, disappearning text and photo messages, and a greater ability for users to control who sees what they post.

The company is also keenly interested in adding features like paywalled Spaces. In addition to those, Twitter has said it’s working on Super Follows, a feature where users can charge for access to bonus tweets or some sort of newsletters.

Twitter laid out bold goals in a recent meeting with analysts and investors, targetting 60% more daily active users and doubled annual revenue. It currently has around 200 million such users and did $3.7 billion in sales last year. Things like Spaces and Super Follows are important elements of this plan, meant to increase engagement on Twitter and keep its audience on its site.

The company faces stiff competition. Every major social media platform is at work on new direct-payment tools like Super Follows, and newcomers to the industry see them as necessary from the start—including Clubhouse, which has its own popular version of audio chat rooms and a stated mission this year to add ways for users to monetize their followings on the app.

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