Why it matters: Tomorrow is a weather service featuring paid weather content in conjunction with meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus. It also signals Twitter’s continued march into paid subscriptions which underscores how much it wants to leave advertising.
Twitter today launched a local weather service called ‘Tomorrow‘. The company partnered with climate journalist Eric Holthaus plus 18 other meteorologists to create free and paid weather related content for a $10/month.
This new endeavor is clearly advancing Twitter’s goal of replacing ads as a primary source of revenue. Twitter unveiled its ticketing system last month to allow creators to monetize Spaces content. The company is also rumored to be releasing a subscription service called Twitter Blue which eliminates ads and allows users to undue tweets.
Originally reported by Axios, Tomorrow will utilize all of Twitter’s recently introduced creator products like the ticketing system and paid newsletters. The service launches today in 16 cities across North America including Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Toronto, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Detroit, San Antonio, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, and the Dominican Republic.
Some personal news:
I’ve been building a new weather service with Twitter – It’s called @tomorrow.The idea behind Tomorrow is simple: The weather is something that brings us all together.
I’m so excited for you to be a part of it.
Subscribe here: https://t.co/h0gFkiU1MO
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) June 1, 2021
The full team will consist of the aforementioned local meteorologists and about 20-30 climate writers and four part-time editorial staff. The team will write long form Twitter content and “membership-specific short-form content” through Spaces.
Subscribers will also be able to ask unlimited questions during breaking weather news like snowstorms and hurricanes. Queries will initially be through email but Holthaus thinks that a password-protected system via Revue (a newsletter company Twitter acquired earlier this year) could also work. Oddly enough, it’s unclear what free weather content will look like.
As far as Tomorrow is concerned, the goal is to be in 50 major markets by the end of the year and expand internationally to places with less sophisticated weather services like India or Brazil by 2022. Twitter also hopes to expand the concept of Tomorrow in which Twitter creates local journalism “collectives” that can be monetized. See the official trailer below.
