Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.
Anushree Fadnavis | Reuters
Shares of Twitter jumped more than 8% in morning trading Wednesday after the company posted a job listing saying it was building a subscription platform under the code name “Gryphon.”
The company revealed little about the new platform, though said it will work with its Payments and Twitter.com teams.
“We are building a subscription platform, one that can be reused by other teams in the future. This is a first for Twitter! Gryphon is a team of web engineers who are closely collaborating with the Payments team and the Twitter.com team,” Twitter said on the job posting.
The move could help diversify Twitter’s revenue beyond advertising, which accounts for more than 80% of the company’s revenue. In Q4 2019 — before the coronavirus shut down large swaths of the economy and advertisers began to draw back on spending — Twitter’s ad revenue was up 12% from the year-ago quarter. In Q1 2020, it was essentially flat from the previous year’s quarter.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The stock could also be boosted by Monday’s comments from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the U.S. government was looking at banning TikTok, a rival social media platform. It’s already been banned in India.
The banning of TikTok could provide some competitive relief to social media platforms, such as Snapchat and Facebook, Morgan Stanley’s sales team wrote Tuesday morning.
Shares of Snap were up nearly 4.5% early Wednesday, while Facebook stock was up incrementally.
