Twitter Turns to Medium to Help Boost Its User Acquisitions

Twitter (TWTR) has partnered with online publishing platform Medium in an apparent attempt to boost its user acquisitions. The partnership involves Medium giving Twitter users free access to its premium content. Typically, Medium requires people to pay a subscription fee of $5 per month or $50 per year to access its premium content, but the partnership means that these charges are being waived for Twitter users.

For Twitter, the Medium deal could prove valuable to its efforts to grow its user base. For example, those who want to access premium posts on Medium but are unable or unwilling to pay may decide to come to Twitter to enjoy free access.

Twitter exited the fourth quarter with 126 million daily users, a tiny audience compared to Facebook’s (FB) 1.5 billion daily users.

In Twitter’s ad-supported social media industry, audience size is a big deal. Advertisers typically want to connect with a larger audience, as is evidenced by platforms with large audiences capturing huge advertising dollars. For example, Facebook’s 1.5 billion daily users helped it attract $16.6 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter.

Google (GOOGL), whose platforms such as YouTube reach over 1 billion people, generated $32.6 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter. Baidu (BIDU) and Yelp (YELP) generated advertising revenues of $3.1 billion and $235 million, respectively, in the quarter. Twitter generated $791 million in advertising revenue in the quarter.