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Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.
People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.
Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important.
Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.
As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."
> Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter.
Black Rock and Cato pushed Dorsey out. I thought this was common knowledge and a clear sign of where Twitter is headed (and indeed where some notorious Twitterers would have liked it to go a while back).
Getting high on ones own supply is precisely the point. Its meant to be addictive, for Twitterers and followers alike.
Can you give links for further reading. I think I read about certain investors but never saw black rock names as one who wanted him out.
Who is Cato in this? Presumably not the Cato Institute? Lol
I'd assume it IS. Dorsey has recently been directly targeted by numerous Cato Institute publications and lobbying efforts [1]. Which is comical, given just a couple years ago Cato was pressing government to stay out of social network regulation [2, 3]. It was only when Twitter started penalizing disinformation/fact checking that they started changing their tune.
1.
https://www.cato.org/blog/brief-history-deep-deplatforming
2.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-government-should-n...
3.
https://www.cato.org/blog/keep-government-away-twitter
Twitter doesn't need to make money, its a technological arm of the Democrat party and other Globalists.
There is a Twitter Executive who is literally an active officer in the British Army psyops brigade:
https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-s...
Founders like Dorsey can be bribed [correction] 'have their NFTs bought' for millions to control/silence them:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/jack-dorsey-sells-his-first-...
Iâm not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I donât have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. And Iâm not the only one.
Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?
An issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform.
But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.
A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.
Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.
Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say Iâd pay a few hundred bucks for it.
But thereâs no way Iâm spending $1,000 a year on it if I canât expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so itâs hard to correctly account for it).
Blue checks are an arbitrary decree from above that someone inside Twitter likes you. The whole thing is a sham.
Blue checks are mostly reserved for some specific categories of users: celebrities, mainstream media journalists, and politicians. It's not absolute but my experience is that being only reasonably well known (thousands of followers) in, say, tech circles isn't enough to get a blue check. So it's not so much being liked but being in a category which Twitter has determined is important to avoid people faking identity.
I had someone spoof my profile a while back. (Chose hard to tell apart user name and used my profile pic etc. to do some crypto spamming.) Twitter promptly nuked their account but wouldn't verify me afterwards.
While there are many factors, an essential one is that someone in Twitter finds you morally acceptable.
If Twitter thinks you're not morally good, they will actually _remove_ a blue check which they previously granted (e.g. they did this to Milo Yiannopolous). If blue checks were just about identity veritifaction, this would make no sense since Milo's account's identity was never in question. Ergo, it isn't just about identity verification.
This has been my experience as well. A perfect example is podcasters - Anna [1]
hosts a relatively popular and occasionally politically inconvenient podcast called Red Scare. No check. Alexandra [2], the host of Call Me Daddy, also a popular comedy podcast, naturally has a check. This is pretty openly discussed by e-celebs of middling fame. Until one reaches a critical mass of popularity, you won't get a check if you don't correctly toe the culture line.
[1]
https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan
[2]
https://twitter.com/alexandracooper
Did Milo lose his verified status because someone didn't like him or was it because he broke some rule in the T&Cs? IIRC he was a big part of "gamergate", a movement that acted hostile to a subset of Twitter's user base.
That still implies it isn't about identity verification.
It's even a badge of shame in some circles.
Which circles is it a badge of shame in?
The folks who rage against the media and political establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets and to anyone running for office.)
Yes; among these political groups, "blue check" is a pejorative as belonging to the member of the "liberal elite" [0].
[0]
https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-der...
This one
Blue check used to mean "identity objectively verified", useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the actual person/group others think they are.
Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not just weirdos.)
Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved opposition.
Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to "one of us, not them".
Wouldn't it be amusing if Twitter started doing verified red badges to signify Republicans? I guess if they really want to be all-inclusive, allow users to customize their badge colors too.
(I didn't know what a blue checkmark was until I turned off dark mode)
Amusing, but still problematic. Blue check was intended as neutral authentication. Turning it into a preferred faction indicator just serves to promote factional divisions - something Twitter could use a lot less of. âŠwhich brings us back to the OP point that blue checks have become a mark of shame, promoting division instead of objectivism.
this happens to leftists, journalists, and other critics, not just repubs:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
No, you're confused. Those are suspensions. We're talking about removing the blue check mark or denying it. This happens to people who aren't morally-approved by Twitter for moral reasons.
For example, the blue check was _removed_ from Milo Yiannopolous (the gay conservative provocateur who was canceled a few years ago), after he was previously verified.
Every "rule" on Twitter is no more than a tool used to create the appearance of left-wing consensus by suppressing alternative views through selective enforcement. Nothing is even-handed, and it's incredibly obvious when you're the target.
dirtbag leftists can't get blue checks and right wingers say "no one's being persecuted but us".
please move beyond this a bit and come to the understanding that _every single thing Twitter does is arbitrary_ from rules enforcement, labeling, suspensions, etc. It's the nature of the service, and frankly boring at this point. We could talk more about why the business model sees this to continue (twitter can't disrupt its income stream and the rules that get enforced are those that allow Twitter to stay in business).
Do you have any examples of dirtbag leftists losing their blue check marks due to political ideology or some such?
Interesting comparison: for the Left, you choose the qualifier âdirtbagâ which presumably is a very small fraction of that faction ... while comparing that unpleasant small minority with the _entire other half of the political spectrum_.
I can (sort of, but would rather not) see denying authentication to problematic nutcases of any kind, and can see that edge case not pedantically covered/excluded by ânobody but usâ. Sure, we can chalk up fringe cases to inconsistent boundaries of enforcement. But lumping in a plurality of users with edge cases is willful blindness to the blue check exclusion being official from-the-top policy, not mere erratic enforcement of vague rules by underpaid contractors.
Sure itâs boring if youâre not in the targeted plurality. Itâs significant when Twitter is your only viable podium in the public town square, and anything you want to say thatâs meaningfully & reasonably dissenting may get you kicked out because Twitter management is decidedly biased.
> while comparing that unpleasant small minority with _the entire other half of the political spectrum_.
These are verified:
https://twitter.com/McConnellPress
https://twitter.com/LeaderMcConnell
Sure, but it wasn't so absolute. They didn't uncheck all conservatives, they just applied standards unevenly (but probably, in their minds, justifiably), which results in disproportionate results.
It's an echo chamber problem, but I'm not sure it's deliberate.
In an organization with hundreds, possibly thousands of people, how would you get human-defined standards to be applied evenly when other people are actively existing in the grey area between what is and is not okay? Eg how do you define pornography that won't also get eg breast exams for cancer blocked? Now imagine that someone stands to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they can get something past your very human operators that both is (according to viewers) and is not (according to the censors) pornography.
The problem's even harder with text - sarcasm and satire just don't come off in pure text. Emoji and "/s" helps, but they're not requisite.
So they stopped verifying racists? Sounds fine to me.
The world must be so simple and straightforward to you when you can just throw millions of people in a slur-labeled category and then treat them as non-humans deserving of unlimited suffering.
the well-educated circles
> Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.
I don't really agree with this. In my experience as a daily Twitter user, most of the posts I see that aren't from specific sub-communnities I participate in are from low-follower accounts that had one of their tweets go viral. I think generally as long as you have _some_ followers, you're only one timely/clever joke away from hundreds of thousands of people seeing your tweet.
I would be surprised if Twitter doesn't already have some kind of behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users to protect their accounts and do whatever other special things.
If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.
Twitter's already done what even other major social platform has done and become dependent on advertising revenue. If Twitter becomes all paid and charges even $1/mo, that would wipe out a huge amount of "normal" users that are accustomed to paying the price of free, and then that's going to impact the ad revenue because of lesser targeted normal people to advertise to.
I think the problem Twitter is going to face is how to balance all the plates they have in the air with realistic expectations.
It's the "classic" problem that these platforms want to solve to keep up with investor expectations. So far, there's mostly a bunch of 'little' approaches to this like selling some random digital trinkets or paying for some 'meh' extra features, but these things are like side-dishes that don't reap enough benefits to compensate for appetites of continuous profit expansion.
This is sort of like being torn different ways. From one angle, if Twitter "changing the formula too much" makes the platform worse and people leave, then they don't grow and face shareholder backlash. From another angle, if Twitter hits a wall on monetization and can't figure out how to boost their cap, then Twitter becomes an unattractive investment and will just kinda flatline growth. And finally, people could still just find a new thing to go to anyways and if Twitter does not and stays Twitter, people still might get bored and move over to TikTok or Reddit or whatever.
Basically, even Twitter shows it's still hard to balance reality with desire with mission.
>If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.
They probably drive a ton of engagement, which benefits twitter.
> behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users
Twitter licenses premium data APIs. Twitter's "VIP level" users are those that pay significant amounts of money to consume these data APIs to extrapolate whatever sort of information the data can provide.
You can research and confirm this yourself but sources for my assertion:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/19/what-will-happen-t...
If you're paying money to Twitter for this sort of info, Twitter bends over backwards to support you.
You could offset the costs of building "customer" filters for super users as well -- ones that do a lot of work to ensure certain people never comment or their comments are downweighted.
Why is there this assumption that people will pay for something that's currently free?
I've felt for a while that a pay-to-post model with a straight chronological feed would solve a lot of the problems of today's social media. I toy with the idea of building it myself.
Twitter offers a chronological feed, the little star thing on the upper right. Works well to get rid of endless scrolling if you don't follow hundreds of people.
Cap the number of followers free accounts can have.
> Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.
I always found it amusing that common people who are not that interesting share the same platform with influential people / thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly parasocial and strange.
Wellâyou can @ their social media manager, anyway. Not much different than "calling your Senator" and getting some secretary in their office.
Though I'm sure some do actually use it themselves (Musk seems to, for instance)
A lot of them seem to and that's the big deal. Though they likely won't see your mention if they don't follow you.
Verified Users get a separate priority queue; the real benefit of being a Blue Check is that other Blue Checks will see when you mention them.
I agree. It really is becoming the Bloomberg Terminal 2.0.
Twitter will never replace bbg.
I would monetize the reach of a post if i were Twitter CEO. Today leaders politicians, celebrities, corps etc have such a wider reach through Twitter due to their following, so Twitter can set a default max threshold on the how many audience the post will reach to and allow users to pay for boost their reach.
I like this because "reach" scales with "moral hazard" and so adding default network decay would help dampen the outragememes. But if you pay to take the dampening off you can be accurately judged for paying to propagate helpful or harmful things.
But isn't the bottom-line effect that your model becomes pay-for-clout? That sounds bad on its face
this is literally ads.. and we saw how well that works (for say Facebook)
Incredibly well. Article even makes the comparison to Facebook.
> Think politicians
Twitter is biased, that's what I think.
_Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users â which I think vastly overstates Twitterâs elasticity of demand amongst its core user base_
Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in _ten_ stayed. Iâd even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month.
(Iâm mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All Iâm basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and peopleâs commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)
I'd expect it to be more like 1 in a hundred staying. Certainly I'd take it as an excuse to cut the tie and try to find which discords people had fled to. They'd probably lose a third of their users _simply by annoucing the plan_.
There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
> There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
Twitter rolled out Super Follows[1] and Twitter Blue[2] a few months ago
[1]
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
[2]
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci...
And it was pretty much DOA, IIRC.
Super Follows work well, Twitter Blue just doesn't have much pull to it since it doesn't allow editing tweets. People won't drop Patreon immediately, but over time we'll see Super Follows more since Twitter can provide more chances of discovery over Patreon.
twitter blue launched in the US on november 9. i think it's a little early to call it DOA.
super-follows launched widely around the same time, after being in private beta since september. at least in my anecdotal experience, i see quite a few high-profile twitter personalities have enabled it - no idea how many people are actually paying them though.
Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. It would be really good for decentralization actually, I kinda want them to do this lmao
>Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances.
The Hacker News force is strong in this one.
on edit: born of familiarity with the genre here, but no there is not going to be a great upswelling of everyone running to spin up local mastodon instances. Except in some of the techie market, and not even all of us have the time for that.
Maybe a bit tangential to the original comment, but starting my potentially controversial rant on Mastodon and Twitter:
The real problem with Mastodon, is that it's too similar to Twitter! People try out new sites because they have something different in terms of content creation or consumption (Discord, with its real-time communication and flow of conversations, Tiktok for its instant video creation and consumption, etc...) But Mastodon has nothing new to show off, since it's basically a Twitter clone (yeah, with some extra features like federation, but seriously why use it when you have Twitter?)
Mastodon has basically become Twitter for ex-Twitter people who don't want to deal with ratios and wild crowds and have their own "cozy" space. And I've observed people trying to move to Mastodon and realize it's a very quite place and immediately jump back in on Twitter after a month... I understand that there is a niche of people who dig that kind of cozy stuff, but most people still just love the wildness of Twitter where anyone can be commented on, retweeted, quote-tweeted, "ratioed", and "get judged and fucked by the audience". Yes, it's also one of the most horrible and deranged places of the Internet, but people accept that and still log in because we have our own death drives to fulfill. We know that cigarettes and drugs are harmful, but isn't that the point?
There is only so much that one microblogging app differs from another, or one chat app from yet another chat app. But there's more to Mastodon than what you describe. The fact that you have chronological timelines, and not some random algorithmically generated list and recommendations flying in from everywhere, is really refreshing. This means too that when you first use Mastodon, your UI is mostly empty. It seems quiet. The impatient ones then already leave. If you take the time to build your following, then you get a great personal timeline. And the server instance you choose can already give you a nice community in the server timeline. The fediverse is small compared to Twitter user base, but with millions of users there's plenty to explore and engage with. And there's better netiquette in general.
Oh, I totally agree on all counts. I have no reason to use Mastodon while Twitter still exists and is free. OTOH I'm currently working at a company building a social platform specifically targeted at crypto communities, and it's fun to think about what sorts of different features we can offer to that space of users and their specialized needs.
What company? Sounds intriguing
My main point is that "Free" is a strong force to reckon with, in the face of a monthly subscription fee. Of course, Mastodon isn't actually free, but it's the sort of situation like IRC, where only one ops guy willing to spend a little bit can host the space for everyone.
At least, this is the logic I and the rest of my Twitter circle (which is fairly large! I've met probably 50-100 people irl through Twitter, got my job through Twitter, have two accounts with follower counts in the thousands, etc) would likely use if planning to jump ship. People who treat Twitter as a pure feed rather than as a social space might be willing to pay, but part of what makes Twitter such a great news source is that _anyone_ can post current happenings, and how many of those _anyones_ with small accounts will be willing to pay just to use the platform once every week or two?
Of course, Twitter could get around all this by having paid accounts for power users only, but then many of the most important and largest accounts would jump ship and devalue the platform for everyone else, leaving only paid marketing accounts that cater to fans and brands. Not a great situation.
Point being, it's a hard problem, for Twitter to monetize without losing the thing that makes it a great platform, and my guess is charging all users a flat subscription fee ain't gonna cut it, and would produce an exodus to the next-most-similar platform, i.e. Mastodon.
While i agree with you that this is an unlikely future, trump is launching a mastadon instance for himself and his followers, so it is totally a thing that people are doing - slowly.
In fact, the domain of your account could actually be a huge social symbol. Maybe celebrities use @verified.social while everyone else gets @twitter.com or @trump.social or whatever.
masto.host is pretty much the standard managed platform for people who don't want to run their own Mastodon. $7 is only a little more expensive than this proposed price, and you can host a few friends on it.
Second this, hosted private (allowing interop with public) spaces will become ubiquitous.
> The Hacker News force is strong in this one.
Since I don't have enough karma to downvote I'll say why I hate this kind of comment.
1) It violates HN's comment guidelines, "Be kind." "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. "
2) It tries to put you above all the "nerds". As if you're so much smarter than the borderline asperger nerds that are somehow incapable of putting any thought into usability of products.
3) You're one of us, you're here on Hacker News. This is a giant non-monolithic forum.
4) It lacks imagination and it's stuck in the status quo. Innovation doesn't just appear fully formed out of a slick FAANG press conference. Innovation happens one curious motivated hacker at a time pushing barely usable tech forward while people like you sneer at them.
I don't even think that discord is that good an alternative.
Matrix and/or IRC works REALLY well for me, for the most part.
I am on discord mostly because pre-existing communities/not having any alternative.
Discord is great because of community discoverability and ease of joining IMO. My main gripe with IRC is that I need to add a whole separate server with a separate login to access different channels (which is, ofc, a feature and not a bug). This means I end up with like 4-5 different servers coexisting in my irssi instance. On top of that, I need access to a persistent server session, as some of these servers ban cloud IRC providers like IRCCloud.
Overall, Discord is just a lot better for getting small groups spun up quickly. That said, I also have to use Discord for certain work client communities (mostly in the crypto space), and it's annoying to maintain a separate professional Discord identity from my social one. The compromise I've settled on is that I use social login in the web client and work login on Desktop, but on mobile I have to pick one or the other, or do a lot of annoying login switching. So, to some extent, I totally agree. Ironically easier to SSH into my server on my phone and run tmux if I need to access my various IRC sessions.
Mind you, this is talking about daily addicted users, not the total user base.
> There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
They will never do this.
Twitter has become a self-absorbed status tool for people who believe the supposedly correct things. These days, one of those things is thin-skinned censorship. Allowing payments would reveal that their most popular users are people that do not agree with the worldviews of the Twitterati.
If it comes down to charging marketers for some hand-wavy conception of "reach" that can't be attributed, or _direct_ attribution that would definitively show that Twitter is a biased dumpster fire, Twitter will always pick the former.
Agreed, I just don't see it.
Subscriber counts for a handful of subscription companies:
Netflix: 209M Amazon Prime: 200M Spotify: 165M Disney+: 118M Youtube Premium/Music: 50M Hulu: 44M Charter: 30M NY Times: 8M WaPo: 3M
Except for youtube premium you don't have any alternative for the sites available for free. For twitter there is sea of alternatives that does the exact same thing.
> there is sea of alternatives
None of them even remotely have Twitter's reach, and more importantly content creators ranging from heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities.
Right, but people are not paying $4 to read this. At least 99% of the market would drop off. I literally just log on to see what hilarious things papa elon tweet, without it I would just... do something better with my time.
> heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities
I'm reminded of my OH's retort to someone reportedly claiming fluency in multiple languages, "Great, but do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?"
I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of information. For me, it's a last-ditch-saloon means to complain to companies who can't or won't publish a customer services email address. That's all.
Twitter is the first place every piece of information has been posted on the internet for a decade. Seeing it asap might not matter for you, but it does for many people.
> I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of information
Good for you, but there are millions of people who don't share this view, including the whole point of this discussion is for those people.
Absolutely agreed - whatâs the thing in common all the listed âpaid forâ subscriptions have? Good quality content.
Whatâs twitters general concept? 140 word tweets that are intended to have very little thought go into them in general. That to me is poor quality content.
> That to me is poor quality content.
Yet many people pay for the twitter API data stream already.
Sea of alternatives and I have never heard about one.
Parler popped up pretty quickly. I would be very surprised if everyone didn't immediately migrate if twitter announced this.
Parler has a reputation.
Not necessarily Parler, just saying they showed it's easy enough to create a twitter clone and gain popularity.
Spotify has a free tier too of course, with a bit more free users than paying ones according to Wikipedia.
The key is that none of these have free alternatives, besides NY Times and Washington Post (I don't know what Charter is). Twitter has many free alternatives so it'd be closer to the bottom of this list.
What about $7.99/mo to apply for and keep a blue check? Itâs only displayed if youâre verified _and_ a subscriber.
The blue check, calling card of the Twitter cultural elite, is such a highly coveted status symbol that it's almost incomprehensible to me that Twitter hasn't come up with a way to directly monetize it. It's an incredible amount of value just sitting there.
My understanding is that they basically have.
If your ad spend is greater than ~$5k, you get a twitter liaison that can fast-track verification.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Ahuvia/publicatio...
or charge few cents per post for users with large number of followers. if you have thousands for followers you should be little careful in terms of what you post. charging money would put some control.
> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed.
Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
Their stock would have done better had they done this long ago.
Their massive headcount is mostly just a drain on profitability, and very hard to argue there's much value add.
Certainly infra, data science etc takes headcount, but last I heard Twitter has hundreds or thousands of product devs and their product has had close to 0 changes in the last 5 years. What do these people do all day, really?
I mean, they are flat from their 2013 IPO, while basically every other tech has rocketed.
And that is totally fine when looking for the "unsexy ad-revenue gain" and not stock appreciation.
Which isn't what anyone is looking for with twitter. That strategy leads to the CEO being fired.
I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!
A move like that could make very transparent how many of those accounts are bots. It seems risky if the active users are inflated (idk if it is the case but it could very well be)
I wonder if the author remembers App.net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
Your take is correct. Twitter would be decimated by requiring $4/month to use it, and that might be generous. Could they even get 5-10 million paying subscribers? Probably initially, however the network would erode rapidly and those paying subscribers would drop off.
Someone else would simply step in and fill their shoes with an ad model. The ad model works exceptionally well. Twitter's primary problem is and always has been cost bloat. They should have 30-40% operating income margins; instead it's more like 7%. They have always been very poorly operated and very poorly structured as a business. They did $357m in operating income on $4.8b in sales the last four quarters. When Facebook was that size they had 25-30% operating income margins (while growing very fast), there's no reason Twitter shouldn't be able to at least match that at this stage of their business life (there isn't some great 80% growth surge coming next year that they need to be prepared for, staffing up ahead of time).
They could limit their free tier to say 1000 characters and 10 retweets a day, while retaining unlimited browsing and "likes." If you want more than that, subscribe to Twitter Blue. Or watch a 30 second ad to reload your character/retweet inventory. If they do it right they could get obsessive Tweeters paying $99.99 a pop like free-to-pay gamers trying to max out their gear.
Twitters Revenue/Employee Headcount (not counting any contractors) is currently around 636k/employee. As far as FAANG companies go Twitter has an over bloated workforce.
The very reason why much of the internet is financed by advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a subscription.
Yeah I quit everything but IRC. Twitter was so gross, I don't miss it, but actually actively wish that it would die. It's SO gross. I can't believe I used that trash for as long as I did, talk about a tool to destroy commonality man. The sooner people quit, the better the world will be, I hope one day it will be seen as akin to smoking in public, the more smokers the more dangerous. Maybe like cigarettes one day it will only be popular in France where all the wokest freaks live.
I was with you until the âwoke Franceâ stuff.
Which is ironic because France strikes me as one of the least "woke" countries in Europe.
Well funny you say that, but my parents there were telling me about it !! And they cant speak nor read English so there s something going on. I dont follow French stuff much anymore (am in China), but I ve noticed more racial separatism debate in France (like should we do like the US and start defining races in the seemingly positive intention to protect "weak" races or should we continue saying humans are not split in races but are just a messy gradient of weather-dependent attributes losing the ability to target policies at people based on those attributes)
No country is perfect, but French society is pretty notoriously sexist and racist.
It seems crazy that people bemoan the fact that twitter _only_ does 4.8 bill or whatever the current run rate is. Since when is that awful? It's only awful when you compare it to Facebook and a few others. Compared to _almost all businesses ever_, it has grown to be a giant in an amazingly short period of time and is doing well on every dimension, including financial.
It's popular, engaging and has a solid business model. Again, only when you compare it to some of the most freakish outliers in the history of business does it look less than amazing.
Well you've just outlined the problem.
Twitter's Board of Directors is a listing of people who've come to _expect_ the projects with which they're involved - either directly or tangentially - or with which they invest, to perform in such a ridiculously obscene manner that even _exceptional_ growth and profits _appears_ to be "underperforming".
For many of these people, there's no problem - where "problem" is defined as 'not being a 1000x bagger stock 5 - 10 years from IPO launch' - that cannot be solved through some alchemical combination of AI/ML, automation, aggressive user engagement, monetization, etc.
Compared to Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc., Twitter is an _also-ran_. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly _insane_ to think.
I just did a super take with a sibling comment to yours comparing Twitter to other social media and comm products.
> Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think.
Yes, this is absolutely crazy!
The other problem is how much Twitter is brought up by people and the media. Data shows a minority of the already minority of people who use Twitter, talk politics. Yet you canât go any time without people pointing to Twitter as a representation of a huge population to prove their points.
For example, reactions to âcancellingâ someone will have droves of people and media point to a tiny portion of Twitter saying things that canât represent the massive demographic people are critiquing.
All of this makes Twitter seem so much more important even to people not constantly around tech, startup, or SV circles.
> seem so much more important
Comes to mind the scene in Heinlein's Glory Road where the hero stuffs the hostile giant's foot in the giant's own mouth, and pushes hard. Keeps pushing etc, until there's only a ball of wax to dispose of.
(Sidekick's comment: "Didn't know you were good at advanced math.")
I wish that one day, there is a non-profit organization which provides social media and almost everyone uses it. Direct ads are forbidden. There are set of some high level rules and any country can be part of moderation as long they follow these same rules.
Maybe money could come selling from some anonymized data. Even partially government funded. Infrastructure should be decentralized. Maybe you can pay 1⏠per month to get more some features.
It takes only tiny fraction what these current companies are making money, to maintain such environment.
Forbidden dystopia...
I combined two draft blog posts and wrote an intro to give some context to why people may see Twitter as not having lived up enough. Itâs going to be very long. Heh. No worries if it isnât read:
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Many growth/tech stocks are off by 10-40% from higher peaks or averages since the market went bananas in April & May 2020. Almost all growth/tech stocks are off by over 10% from late Oct or mid Nov.
Twitter as you stated with its run rate, will top $5B rev in 2021. The stock price opened at $45.5, $36.5B market cap. Twitter is off ~30% from most of 2021. Which is $65/share and a $52B market cap.
*Comparisons*:
- Pinterest market cap is ~25% less. Not well monetized so far. ~$2.5B rev in 2021.
- Snap's market cap is more than double. Rev could hit $4B for 2021. So ~22% less.
- LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Announced in June, completed December 2016. It was trading at a $17.5B market cap before acquisition. Rev for 2016 was $3.7B. This year the run rate has topped $10B. 2021 rev will top $11.5B.
- For context, Twitter was worth $13B in June 2016 with $2.5B rev for 2016.
- Github was bought for $7.5B in stock. Announced and completed in June and Oct 2018. Microsoft shares were $99 in June 2018. They opened at $335 today. Those $7.5B acquisition shares are worth $25.5B today.
- Gitlab, a partial competitor to Github, closed its 1st public day on Oct 14, 2021 above $15B. It's valued above $14B today. Annual run rate above $200M.
- Gitlab has no overlap with Twitter. GitHub does with its social network and other trends. GitHub's valuation, whether under Microsoft now, or as a hypothetical public company, is likely 3x+ Gitlab. Or ~$45B. Github 2018 rev was likely above $300M. These numbers won't line up with Twitter because of both getting a lot of SaaS, subscription, and enterprise revenue.
- Telegram allegedly has been bank rolled by its founder since inception. I personally doubt this, but regardless, its bank roll has been limited. It didn't get the vast capital or marketing/namespace an SV company gets. Telegram's burn rate is lower than Twitter or any other company listed. Rumors say Telegram has turned down funding at a $30B valuation. Other rumors speak to a $30-50B IPO in 2023.
- LINE, a messaging app with some social network features, is based in and most popular in Japan. It was a subsidiary of Korean company, Naver. LINE went public a few years ago. It did a 50/50 merger with Softbank's Yahoo Japan. The combined company, Z Holdings, has a market cap of $45B. LINE is most popular in a couple of South East Asian countries and with expats.
- KakaoTalk, a messaging app with some social network features, is based in and most popular in Korea. It is much smaller than the others. 50M active users in 2021 with 90% in South Korea. KakaoTalk's parent company, Kakao, merged with Naver's competitor Daum with the current company called Kakao and valued at $45B. KakaoTalk only represents a fraction of this value.
This reminds me of when everyone found out during the dot com bubble that Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was run out of a single office with something like a dozen or so employees.
It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck me as the first time that the general public started to really think that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack.
Twitter has a monopoly and 3B+ in revenue. It's hard to see how this justifies a 36B+ market cap. It's in a much better position than many, many other unicorns.
[1] I'm going off of a twenty two or twenty three year old memory, so I may have gotten the company wrong.
> Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was run out of a single office with something like a dozen or so employees.
Ironically, they still have the same business model now - but with severe bloat (20k employees).
Don't their employees handle communication with the myriad accommodation owners and tourists that often don't speak the same language? Sure, often you can just do everything using the web interface, but sometimes you need to ask questions and Booking handled that quite quickly in the past.
> It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck me as the first time that the general public started to really think that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack.
That's because the general public, and frankly even the non-general public, have never fully understood the digital computer: it's a leverage machine. It allows the exceptionally intelligent and/or insightful to leverage code to do what would have taken thousands, or even millions of workers to achieve.
That's why a billion dollar photo startup can be created by three people and sold to Facebook.
It looks like alchemy to the people without knowledge, because it's complex, difficult, requires a bit of luck (the right time / right place combination), and frankly, _does_ require a certain level of intelligence that's well above average in order to fully exploit.
Just the low employee count is not a bad thing in itself. Whatsapp had I think 50 employees when it was sold for $19 billion.
...Twitter has a monopoly?
On what they do? Absolutely.
If you combine all of the different 'social media' platforms together into a single category? No.
What is it that Twitter does exactly? It mostly seems to exist to put out short one-to-many messages that other media organizations can then cite as Zeitgeist. That may not be a monopoly, but it certainly isn't benevolent to the user, and it isn't how it was billed when it was new.
> What is it that Twitter does exactly?
Break news and sic mobs on people. Both activities many people are extremely interested in being a part of.
I want to remind you that ur definition of monopoly would make every niche business a monopoly. Social media IS a single category.
The question is, which aspect is monetized: reading or writing? If it's reading, then I see Twitter quickly losing out to a platform that is free to read. Politicians and celebrities wouldn't make announcements on a platform that requires payment to read. If it's writing / having an account, then the suggestion is a lot more reasonable. I would pay $4/mo, and would be very glad to not have spam comments below every tweet I read.
Twitter is a first-responder medium. If people had to pay we'd miss so many breaking events that make it valuable to journalists et al in the first place. That model would work for a newsletter , but not for a live medium
They already have a subscription model for this: Twitter Blue
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci...
It enhances the experience on Twitter for those that desire more features: a thread feature (which is /really/ nice IMHO), ability to cancel tweets after send, more color themes and customizable icons, etc.
The Twitter "as we know it" will likely always remain free and ad-driven, but if you want an enhanced experience, you're going to have to pay for it. And that's fine by me.
I'd buy twitter blue right now if it didn't still have ads. I'd pay 3 times its cost if it was just ad free. Sure it's not a problem on my computer because I have adblock but I primarily use twitter on my phone, and I'm too lazy to set up an adblocking DNS like pihole.
You can try to use a third-party client like Tweetbot. They don't have ads.
A carefully-applied monetisation model could be quite helpful for the community as well as Twitter's bottom line. Private accounts - perhaps with an extended network, friends-of-friends - could still remain free and generate ad revenue.
The one issue is that chipping off existing features would cause major backlash. While removing low-quality replies and other spam is nice, it relies on even higher-quality moderation, to provide adequate incentive not to lose out on a purchase, but also to avoid regulatory issues, as this now becomes a product.
When it comes to adding features to sweeten the deal, however, there are very few that can really be added that provide a tangible benefit. The only feature I can think of is being able to edit tweets - or more accurately, embed a second tweet, similar to a quote-tweet, to provide an update. This would allow people to provide context, retract claims, or other uses, especially when a tweet gets attention or controversy, and could go a small way in reducing toxicity.
Twitter's ad targeting is atrocious and they're just throwing money away. My experience is that the ads are either random national brands, semi-spam as-seen-on-TV-quality stuff, or wildly mistargeted things. E.g. Twitter keeps showing me ads targeted to an oncologist, which is bizarre. Or they are for things on the opposite side of the country from me. My interests are fairly straightforward and Google shows me well-targeted ads, but Twitter's targeting is just a disaster. Before moving to a completely new business model, Twitter should at least try some decent ad targeting.
Me in 2009: âI love twitter. I can follow so many people doing things Iâm interested in.â
Me again, today:âDeleted that shit and never going back.â
The poor management brought me to that ending and I donât foresee it getting anything but worse with the new CEO.
If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with (because people would have found it valuable enough to pay for in the first place). In some ways, Twitter has the "news" problem in that people just aren't willing to pay for it. As this says, Internet advertising really isn't that effective, especially on a site that is the equivalent of standing in town square with a megaphone. I think Twitter is tapped out on how much money it can make and drastic changes will just drive users to other places. If you're looking for higher returns a different company might be a better idea.
What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.
Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they werenât, Iâd pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.
Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model.
Youâre ignoring the competitive landscape. You might pay for Google, but a lot of people would choose to use a free alternative if they needed to pay. The loss in users would give Google less data and make Google less effective as a search engine.
Youâre absolutely right about Google but, I think, itâs not necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so important that it wouldnât make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone.
And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.
> it wouldnât make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone
True, but they may leave microblogging behind altogether rather than pay. Twitter just isn't that valuable. Then again, I deleted my accounts four or five years ago.
> _social graph is so important that it wouldnât make sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone_
Twitter doesn't have as connected a graph as _e.g._ Facebook. This lets a few hyperconnected users credibly threaten defection.
>>everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably an insurmountable coordination problem.
If this were true we would not have a long long list of defunct once popular platforms where people used to be, but moved away from in mass after poor decisions by the platform operators.
To believe twitter is immune to the digg, myspace, etc effect is hubris not backed by reality
Myspace was for young online people. I was on Myspace. It was tough to even convince half of my friends during that time that being online was fun, let alone being on a social network that didn't really facilitate communication.
Digg was for nerds and nerd-adjacent people. Not sure why you'd even mention it in the same breath as Twitter.
Twitter's scale is so massive, the social graph so varied, that a true replacement is probably years away. It's not impossible for a competitor to take over, of course. Just unlikely.
Thatâs of course a fair point.
But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world. Peopleâs careers and influence are built partly on their follower count and who those followers are. Key users post under their real name.
Digg and MySpace were very different from that.
>>twitter is used as a key communication channel for politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over the world
I think this is over stated, Twitter is used to amplify, or bring attention to some announcment, event, or other communication but twitter itself is not the communication channel, it simply links to the communication channel which is often another platform (youtube as an example) or a website, or some other communication type.
Twitter is advertising, be it paid ads, or the "politicians, public officials, business executives, journalists, academics " advertising their own work directing people off twitter to consume more of that work
Personally I have found very little value and very little substantive communications coming out of twitter, in fact the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts not to find actual information or news
>the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme accounts
Funny how the people who don't use something always know all about it. (Science Twitter is not meme Twitter.)
>>Science Twitter
Well if science is being conducted over twitter that goes along way to explain the terrible state of modern science...
> Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.
I don't think that's true, because they would charge for access and have ads. These are fairly rare.
>Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if they werenât, Iâd pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.
Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.
>plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription model
That's not really true, you have massive consolation because their business model is nonviable any other way.
> Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.
They make money from ads⊠which people see when they use search.
Ad-support allows for a _much_ greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesnât mean people wouldnât pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.
Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.
But the argument here is that Twitterâs users wonât defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.
EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And thatâs only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.
> Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network.
This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that won't pay for the service in the first place.
Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase where they make no money and sell no ads while building a user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the large web companies today have charged to use their product and at this point it's unlikely they could.
>But the argument here is that Twitterâs users wonât defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.
Which is a terrible argument written by someone who doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has literally bought companies where users have migrated to (Instagram/WhatsApp).
> EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps.
Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases). Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with that.
Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free, Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free, Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free, SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at the service cost).
On a business level you can extract payments (think Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).
What I don't fully subscribe to here is the statement on Stratechery that:
>and given that some of Twitterâs most hard core users use third-party Twitter clients, and thus arenât monetizable, the revenue per addicted daily active user is even lower
I don't see how this must be true going forward, either by having a standard cost for open access to the API or through inclusion of twitter ads and metrics in the endpoint streams.
As pointed out they are just in the middle of re-opening the API developer ecosystem & it would be a shame to have this reversed by activist investors for the second time.
They could also boost profits by lowering their OpEx. I genuinely donât know why they need to spend a billion dollars a quarter for a product that really doesnât change that much and isnât massively complex.
What counts as complex? Is Facebook complex? Google? How about Netflix?
By the measure of âI can explain how they work in a blog postâ none of these are complex. But trust me, operating internet scale services is complex, regardless of how simple they seem from the outside.
It would be fascinating to see their engineering backlog.
> If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-supported model to begin with
Twitter doesnât cost $0 because no one thinks itâs worth paying for (demand side), itâs because if they did charge theyâd be replaced by someone who didnât (too much potential supply).
If there was a market of people who would pay for such an app, there would be one on the market to satisfy the demand for it. Supply is irrelevant if there is no demand for it in the first place.
Even taking this assertion, it means there is effectively infinite supply so Twitter's service has effectively no monetary value to the consumer. It's still impossible to charge a consumer for it then (and the costs to provide the service have to be paid by a 3rd party in ads).
Edit: It's very difficult to build a network and get to a critical mass like Twitter. I'm still arguing it's demand constrained (people unwilling to pay) because you would see more viable competitors if it were supply.
The amount of money Iâm willing to spend on jeans, electronics, etc. is much higher than the amount Iâm willing to spend on Twitter. Makes sense that a service can sell ads for more money than Iâm willing to pay for the service.
I've proposed a business model for a while for Twitter: take their software and whitelabel it for institutions, media, or whoever's big enough to own their own domain name and wants to have their own @namespace @example.com
this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay.
examples of this being expressed here by me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654
You are describing Mastodon [1]
[1]:
hah, yes in a way I am.
edit: Eugen, you can steal this business model from Twitter if they don't want to play in this space. Run Mastodon-as-a-service and sell it to institutional actors. I don't know who runs Masto.Host but they seem to be positioned to offer your software as a service to these groups.
There are other AP implementations that can be sold (as a service) to these large pocketed groups, not just your own software product.
another edit: this may leave a sour taste in your mouth but you now have a notable political user of your software, one that more than likely does not have the technical competence to be running it on their own. Someone could be making money off of them by providing a managed, white-labeled Mastodon instance (and then be responsible for scaling, security, availability, all the devops shit, etc). Not saying that should be you, but someone could.
This doesnât make any sense. If people are willing to pay for a Twitter like service they are going to pay Twitter before they pay for mastodon instances
And companies already run their own Mastodon instances - the Japanese imageboard/artist website Pixiv runs a Mastodon instance called Pawoo. That's apparently how elephants and/or mammoths sound like in Japanese. :)
sounds like Pixiv has the ops expertise to potentially run Mastodon-as-a-Service to those who would pay to host a managed instance.
There's value in managed services (security, keeping updates applied, uptime, scaling, etc etc)
If there's someone at Pixiv reading this and looking to pivot, I won't feel bad if you take this idea and run with it.
That's great but I just don't see the value there
Governments don't get value from Twitter?
Journalists don't get value from Twitter?
Influencers and other business users don't get value from Twitter? Sports teams? Non-commercial entities?
I appreciate your insight but I disagree with your analysis.
That doesn't mean they'd get value by running their own namespace though.
You might be surprised to know the NSA has already cloned versions of Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter onto US classified networks so IC and DoD agents can use them to publish and exchange classified information the same way influencers use normal social media. I can't remember what they call the Tumblr clone, but the Twitter one is eChirp and the Facebook one is called Tapioca.
It's not like there's anything all that complicated about the basic tech model of "loosely synchronized, eventually consistent live data feed algorithmically sorted with the ability to follow and group sources." Where these services earn their valuations is in sheer scale of the user base combined with the backend telemetry and machine learning services that drive user profiling and personalized ads, but government institutional use would not want or need those features. As far as I know, eChirp and Tapioca are maintained by volunteers and functionally equivalent to Twitter and Facebook if you stripped out the features built for serving personalized ads and maximizing reader engagement.
A better business model would be to charge progressively based on number of followers. This way users pay not for consumption, but for amplification of their messaging.
Something like
0-100 followers : free
100-1,000: $5/mo
1,000-10,000: $20/mo
...
1M+ : $10,000/mo per 1M
The aligns the incentives and value provided. Someone having 1M followers on twitter has a powerful platform for their agenda whatever it may be. This should come at a progressively higher cost to them (not their followers).
I wouldn't bet on this! For this, Twitter would have to divulge how many among the say 1000 followers are bots. Also, this is prone to abuse! An unnecessary follow will now be considered spam, and Twitter would have to build toolings to prevent that. It will drive creators out of Twitter. Sharing ad revenue with creators will be an excellent first step
I agree with the method, even if not with the bands directly. The value for a user is in the number of followers. Anyone with a huge following is deriving a large value, and it's the most obvious point for Twitter to cut into.
All of the large accounts will pay a reasonable fee.
I like it, but that might encourage the top profiles to take their audience off platform entirely. Unlike say Youtube, I don't think Twitter creators are able to monetize directly on platform?
I do no think that would happen. Someone having 1M followers usually has $10k/mo to spare. And the value they are getting from amplifying their message for branding purposes certainly outweighs the cost by couple of orders of magnitude.
I'd probably pay $10k/mo for my brand if it allowed me to talk to 1M people interested in my products as frequently as I wanted. How much would the same cost me on other platforms? A comparable business is something like mailchimp where you pay $300/mo to message just 10,000 contacts.
And yes, Twitter would need to get better at purging bots, but that is a good thing and a nice incentive to have.
I agree with you here. There's a huge value in the amplification of messaging and Twitter's pretty much giving this away for free.
Media and institutions have the budget to pay here.
Is Twitter a platform or a publisher? If Twitter is a platform, it might make sense to charge the most prominent users the most. But if Twitter is thought of as a publisher, it makes sense for Twitter to pay its top creators big bucks.
Free-to-use is somewhere in between: the notable users get compensated with access to attention, and Twitter benefits from the attention-time of their audience.
So, the underlying point that I think you're making -- that notable users get a fantastic deal on social media at the expense of society -- is well taken.
Let's hope that a new mass communications technology emerges to disrupt this dynamic.
It tried very hard to be a publisher all these years, when deep down it is a platform.
This seems like it would get abused instantly.
It's like the ultimate DDOS opportunity- tell everyone to go follow <account you don't like> to drive up their costs to bankrupt them or force them off the platform. Create bot accounts to follow all the up-and-coming politicians of your opposition party or your startup's rival or the media company with a bias opposed to yours.
Then the arms-race component would kick off, and you'd have secondary accounts retweeting primary accounts to spread the followers over hundreds of alt accounts.
The fun part would be they'd have to place caps so hobby users didn't accidentally go viral and get lots of followers, which in turn would create scarcity for the users who follow the now capped account. Imagine someone bragging they're part of the elite 1,000 first followers of whatever random account is popular at that moment.
Jack had his hands in so many pies. Cash App, Square, and also evangelizes cryptocurrency every chance he gets. His Twitter Bio just has one word in it: `Bitcoin`. I think he was spreading himself thinly being involved with Twitter too. Focus.
Absolutely. For a platform with a relatively high engagement early on, they made so many missteps: awful photo/video tools (instagram, tiktok), messing up live, messing up developer experience, stagnant product (awful thread management for YEARS).
However, I still believe it can be fixed. As an example, my consumption of news related information has moved significantly to Twitter. Why not do a better job there, in trying to provide a kick-ass way for content creators/consumers, and charge them for it.
Cash App is just a consumer payments app made by Square, not a separate company.
Agree.
I really don't think Twitter could afford to charge for reading or writing. There is too much competition for eyeballs in social. What they need to do is continue making it free, and enable creators to grew new businesses on top of Twitter and take a cut. The issue here is Apple and Google taking 30%, but growth is growth, even if that cost exists.
Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active user per year
That's plenty to pay for hosting and even a few moderation cases per year. Cool, so they're fine!
Maybe the global newspaper folk, who seem to be the most serious users of the platform, should form a joint venture, buy up twitter, disseminate microblogging news (ad)free and simply use the embedded links to drive traffic to their web platforms (for subscriptions and more in-depth news coverage).
So twitter becomes a sort of neutral preview / public announcement forum, like a kiosk with folded newspapers on the street: you can see the headlines, but you need to buy to read.
Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without twitter...
The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism
There's absolutely nothing stopping a consortium of news outlets from adopting the W3C recommendation ActivityPub to push out microposts directly from their own content management systems, with an existing audience open web audience.
that is in principle possible (essentially replace twitter by RSS aggregator clients) but is not exactly equivalent: for example some entities could microblog on "next-gen twitter" without having a website and there is also the question of reactions from readers to posts (whether those are seen centrally by all users)
that centralization and processing of responses is by-and-large part of the social media problem (both generating the twitterstorm dynamic and having spawned the shadowy "sentiment" industry) but I suspect a lot of addicted users are quite keen to keep it going
Whatever it takes to drive them bankrupt asap.
Share price is going to get a nice squeeze
twitter would be a lot more fun if they just accepted what they're actually useful for, an attention game. they should hire a large team of writers and ban links to the real world- turn the whole thing into a giant fantasy larp game and charge people to play.
Maybe twitter can't make (more) money. Email or Instant messagers don't make money, but they are essential protocols. I think any change to its free model will instantly change its character so much that it will lose relevance and drive people to simpler open source solutions.
> Maybe twitter can't make money.
They had 3.7B in revenue last year. They're doing ok.
Twitter is worthless as long as they continue to censor dissenting opinions.
New business model from me - $0.01 per post/comment, $1 - per hating post/comment.
Make world happy again!
Don't silence dissent, just charge for it? This is the dystopia that scifi taught me to expect..
I use Twitter is to get the latest pulse in real time for any event (news story, episode). I hope they retain that. Problem with highly curated feeds like FB, LinkedIn is that it doesn't give you the the current snapshot and hence I don't even trust it.
I have read from an article that they will enable NFT-based profile pictures in the near future, I wonder how will the new CEO act on this feature.
A better title might be: How to Kill Twitter With This One Trick (Paid Access)
Twitter is IMHO only a communication platform for celebrities and brands. This is <0.1% of the user base. For most people, your Tweets are even less noteworthy than Youtube comments.
What users use Twitter for seems to be three things:
1. As a de facto notifications platform;
2. As a news feed aggregator. This then means consuming content off platform; and
3. "Voting" on content you agree or disagree with. Ultimately this is what liking and retweeing really is: no different to liking a Youtube video. That's all it does.
Users are famously unwilling to part with even small sums of money for Internet services. Twitter seems no different here.
Attempting to paywall Twitter at this late stage is a recipe for disaster. People have become accustomed to receiving information 'for nothing'. Telling them that they must now pay for it will lead to a grand exodus elsewhere. It's not that you _cannot_ create a paywall across a service like Twitter, but that you simply cannot do it on Twitter if for no reason other than the fact that Twitter has operated for fifteen years already without a paywall, and no one is going to start paying for what was already adequately paid for without a subscription.
TL;DR Paywalls are for new services, not Twitter.
I'm curious what will happen to Twitter's stance on BTC and crypto in general, given recent favorable developments.
New guy is drinking at least as much kool-aid as the old guy, so crypto bullshit will continue to burn the world and user goodwill.
+1
When will people like you begin to realize how foolish you sound?
I wish crypto people HODL-ed their opinions.
Are you familiar with the phrase "laughing all the way to the bank"?
But you're your own bank. So you're just laughing at yourself.
Lol this was pretty good I have to admit.
Yeah, and it doesn't apply to cryptocurrency traders, as by simple mathematics, they lose money on average. Cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum game. Any wins you make are either imaginary, or come straight out of somebody else's pocket who loses more.
If the market cap starts falling, yes
No, it has nothing to do with market cap or price at all. Mathematically, _whatever_ the price does, investing in cryptocurrencies means you will, on average, lose money. Even if the price is currently skyrocketing.
Twitter need better relevancy. Their ads are some of the worse I've seen on any platform. The other thing they need, as pointed in the article, is other streams of revenue. Like LinkedIn for example. They sell a premium subscription to a small subsets of overall users (Twitter Blue is trying to do the same), have a successful job board, etc. The article mentions Twitter is making money of selling data. That's a good stream of revenue but they can do much better. I doubt the new CEO would make a big difference though. I think it's a bigger management issue than just replacing the CEO. We'll see how things turn out.
So to respond to the original article by Ben Thompson, I don't think it makes sense to charge all users, but it does make a lot of sense to charge a subset of the users. People (companies) who use twitter for marketing for example.
My favorite options for Twitter to make money are
Elon would then instanly cease twitting on order not to alienate his fanbase.
Or undercut Twitter by selling folks access to his tweets 2000ms before they hit the API. His fanbase would eat that up.
How about: Elonâs tweets get sent to Teslas 5 seconds before Twitter shows them.
In an ideal world, Elon's tweets would be sent to Elon's lawyers 24 hours before Twitter shows them.
How would the second idea make money?
Maybe only some images get flagged with the metadata that say that they work with Twitter, and OpenSea pays Twitter a 10% cut of any works-with-Twitter image rights they sell?
If a user has already spent money purchasing an NFT that they want to use as their profile picture, they will almost certainly spend a bit more for proof of ownership.
make it only available to accounts that pay for it. Could work with that crowd. (or make it a paid thing on the seller side, pay to opt an offered series of pieces in). But probably overall not that much money to be had.
dont know if twitter charges $ to people with large number of followers.
that would be a good way to make money.
The author is risking being a bit glib without much more detailed data check.
People don't like to pay for stuff, and while surely Twitter has many users for whom $4 would be irrelevant, it's going to be a surprisingly small number - and - we've already established a price of $0 in people's minds for the service.
Charging $25/month for the blue check and a bunch of other pro services (including priority in feeds) might be some kind of opportunity.
Where the author is correct and also reasonable in being more generalized about it ... is the lack of a good Ad Program. That should be embarrassing. Twitter has enough data to be able to offer something approaching targeted, actionable Ads like Facebook. And I think they can do it in a reasonable way.
Maybe they could charge people $1 to label other's posts as fake news. And $1 to remove one vote that a post is fake news.
Capitalize on the flame wars. Ya, it won't make the world a better place but does Twitter do that now?
Charge accounts with 100k followers $100 a week. 1m 1000 a week. If they don't pay, they don't have the followers and cannot prove their own business/brand. These are the people who NEED Twitter. Make them pay for the right to access the audience like every other media.
Chat with the crypto bros ... they've got some ideas ...
