> <i>Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base</i><p>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 <i>ten</i> stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month.<p>(I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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."
It seems crazy that people bemoan the fact that twitter <i>only</i> 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 <i>almost all businesses ever</i>, it has grown to be a giant in an amazingly short period of time and is doing well on every dimension, including financial.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] I'm going off of a twenty two or twenty three year old memory, so I may have gotten the company wrong.
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.
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.
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<p>this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay.<p>examples of this being expressed here by me:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654</a>
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
A better title might be: How to Kill Twitter With This One Trick (Paid Access)<p>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.<p>What users use Twitter for seems to be three things:<p>1. As a de facto notifications platform;<p>2. As a news feed aggregator. This then means consuming content off platform; and<p>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.<p>Users are famously unwilling to part with even small sums of money for Internet services. Twitter seems no different here.
> Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active user per year<p>That's plenty to pay for hosting and even a few moderation cases per year. Cool, so they're fine!
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.
The author is risking being a bit glib without much more detailed data check.<p>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.<p>Charging $25/month for the blue check and a bunch of other pro services (including priority in feeds) might be some kind of opportunity.<p>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.
Me in 2009: “I love twitter. I can follow so many people doing things I’m interested in.”
Me again, today:”Deleted that shit and never going back.”
The poor management brought me to that ending and I don’t foresee it getting anything but worse with the new CEO.
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).<p>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.<p>Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without twitter...<p>The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism
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.<p>Capitalize on the flame wars. Ya, it won't make the world a better place but does Twitter do that now?
Twitter is doing just fine. I really don't want Twitter to start bombarding with ads, show only attention grabing content or make people pay subscriptions. I don't understand this enormous urges to have new business models and massive growth at all costs because somehow it's otherwise not an important business. May be some businesses are better left alone from this mindset for long term healthy existence and better services to its customers?
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.<p>Something like<p>0-100 followers : free<p>100-1,000: $5/mo<p>1,000-10,000: $20/mo<p>...<p>1M+ : $10,000/mo per 1M<p>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).
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.
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.
Twitter’s user base is always near saturation; it’s not a moron base. So additional revenue most likely will come from some subscription or producer fee model. A great deal of value comes from posts by reporters, scientists, doctors, writers, front-line working people. This is lost on people reading below about an eighth grade level— limiting the user base.
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.
My favorite options for Twitter to make money are<p>* Early access to tweets -- send an API call with Elon Musk's latest tweets 1000ms before they are public to algorithmic traders for $1M/month<p>* Blue checkmark next to profile pictures that OpenSea verifies you own
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 <i>cannot</i> 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.<p>TL;DR Paywalls are for new services, not Twitter.