$1/month for every 10k followers over your first 10k. Small price to pay for "fame". 1,000,000 followers is $99/month. You don't think Trump and the Kardashians would pay that for the voice it gives them to promote whatever they promote?
Twitter had $2.5B of revenue in FY '16. The average user with more than 10k followers probably only has slightly more than 10k followers (because the distribution of followers/user has most of its mass near 0), so the average rev. per 10k+ user is almost certainly less than $2/month.
So for this model to get TWTR near its current revenue, Twitter would need to have 104 million accounts with more than 10k followers. Twitter only has about 320 million MAUs.
If you think that the % of MAUs with 10k+ followers is closer 0.1%, then the avg. monthly charge would need to be $7,800/month.
exactly. They lost $546m in 2016. Take that divided by the 320m mau's, and you have $1.425 per mau per year. make it an even $2 per year and they are profitable. Assuming they value the service enough ;) I like your plan better though
Not to be snarky, but I would think most companies with 2 billion in revenue and no major manufacturing or inventory expenses wouldn't be in twitters position
There's no direct benefit to the spammer. More effort would go into pruning spammers (from those who are paying, spam protection services) and if twitter credited their account for any payments related to an account marked as spam it seems like it could work. Definitely an interesting model.
That's very similar to the situation with click-based advertising in search engines. I wouldn't say that it isn't working for everyone involved (except those who pay the ads).
Given that the major appeal of Twitter is the ease with which you can reach effectively unlimited numbers of people, I doubt that would be a very popular move.
It might be more feasible to charge people for following other people.
Or just offer a straightforward ad-free experience (maybe with some extra features) for a set monthly fee. Which is what I've wanted all along, but has the disadvantage of fracturing the userbase you can sell ads to and making Twitter a less valuable platform for advertisers, so they'd need a decent conversion rate to offset that.
I now absolutely hate this thing where the internet is made of free stuff and people won't pay for it. I know a load of people who practically live on Facebook but the idea of paying for it horrifies them. Do not understand that.
You don't get how business works, Trump does not needs Twitter, Twitter needs him and Kardashians. Twitter has already lost Kardashian followers to Instagram. As others have pointed out this fails to generate any revenue, let alone recoup cost of implementing this single "feature".
Maybe if they had some CRM functions for brands to use, maybe using machine learning to automatically pick up on nasty tweets about your brand and add them to a queue of cases to investigate.
Seems like a lot of people turn to twitter to complain about products/services when things go wrong, give companies an easy way to handle those?
Yeah I built an integration like this for a hackathon at work (we did call center software, e.g. we serve the people that serve people). The system categorized tweets so that the customer could respond to issues and such - the obvious value add is it's unlikely a customer will come to you directly, but they'd likely complain online.
Somewhat related I've noticed that some of the really successful open source projects meet people where they are and are really accessible via channels like Twitter (SpringBoot and Auth0 are good examples of this, from my experience).
Basically the entire Japanese OSS community runs on Twitter. It's their medium of choice for communication, which is great since discussions are very very open (it's facilitated by their language's much higher information density compared to English, probably ~5x).
The vast majority of the contributors are eager to talk to users around the world, so if you use a project with a known Japanese maintainer, try shooting them a message on Twitter. Their English may be broken at times but you can usually understand what they're saying pretty easily.
I left a year or so back, but it's based in IN (USA) and just got bought by a place in SF (USA). If there was any overlap that's probably enough to identify it :)
The celebrities were always lose leaders for twitter, although I am not sure they realized. The profitable piece would have always been the customer retention and not advertising, once they crossed into main stream. Purchasing is not the mode users are in when on twitter, it is almost always negative brand engagement when the use case is not interpersonal.
Social media monitoring is a small cottage industry that does the things you're describing (and usually extends the monitoring to Facebook, Instagram, and anyone with the API), with Hootsuite being (likely) the largest player.
Yeah, I was thinking a similar thing, but making it more direct: I follow lots of "creatives" on twitter - webcomic artists, bloggers, opensource contributors, citizen journalists, etc. A quick "tip jar" feature in Twitter would be great. Buy up something like Flattr and bake it into the UI.
Holy crap, this is a great idea. Building a Patreon-style paid content/subscription platform on top of Twitter seems worth exploring. By all means Twitter probably already has the userbase for it.
Absolutely agreed, this is brilliant. Ideally partner with Patreon to bootstrap it, but allow anyone with a Twitter account to have patrons. (That also gets more people providing payment information, useful for other future purposes, such as making "sign in with Twitter" support "pay with Twitter".) Then start combining that with a Patreon-style "patron posts" mechanism, increase the limits on "patron posts", and perhaps later introduce a "circles"-like mechanism for non-patron accounts.
Imho Patreon isn't the right fit for Twitter. Twitter is about tiny impulses. Patreon is all about subscription-based stuff. Start with a tip jar of just "donate" - make only approved tweeters can host a tip jar for the first rollout. Make the TOS state tip jar cannot be used for conditional services, only for thanks for services freely provided.
Then expand to payment-locked content in tweets. "hey Johnathan Coulton posted a paywalled song click here to pay $1 to get it!". Make a platform where "1-click purchase" actually makes sense, since the patent's expiring anyways.
Giving users a direct financial incentive to game your system would probably turn your platform into a 'low-effort but popular' content mill in short order. (Imagine what would happen if people could withdraw reddit gold to cash.)
Drawing a line for 'quality control' becomes the next obvious step, but whenever money gets involved (especially other peoples'), any decision you make trying to decide for users how and for whom your system can be used ends up making it less viable to them, even if it's in the best interests of your platform or its quality.
"X with micropayments" isn't a new concept, and it's not a funding model panacea for a reason.
You can't game the system if you're getting paid by other users. We can argue about tweet quality, but it's no different than any other product or service that some people find valuable and others don't.
What you're describing is possible if Twitter agreed to pay top Tweeters to generate popular content, independent of user's volunteering to pay for that content. This would drive low-quality, low-effort content which nobody is interested in, but Twitter pays for anyways.
To keep scammers out they could start with restricting the feature to verified users. That would discourage beggars and hucksters until they work the kinks of admining and monitoring such a beast out.
> With Facebook going the closed garden route, there was a real opportunity for a network player to play the open strategy.
There still is. If there's real irreplaceable value in the platform itself, such as with a mechanism like that, then making the client and network bits more open and protocol-based would help them.
That's actually a pretty smart idea. But the subscription idea seems pretty weak to me. I mean, how many people actually have 1 million+ followers to pay $99/month?
And Trump does seem like the type who'd say "what, you're billing me? Well I'm going to build my own microblogging platform... with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the microblogging."
My initial thought is this would only be used to spam/harass people but if it's tied to actual money maybe it'd be enough of a barrier to be semi usable.
I run a small horror news publication and we'd love to spend money on twitter. We've tossed some money towards ads and have had a nice return from it. What we can't figure out is how much money it'll take before they'll verify us. Maybe that's something they could just offer to businesses without having to submit a request and ultimately be denied for whatever reason.
I think it's fair to say I'd be very interested in throwing more money at twitter.
No monetization yet. Although, we are building out some tools for people that run haunts that will for sure be monetized. Went into this knowing there isn't that much money in this sector for just websites.
Google at least claims that when showing your business in the knowledge graph, the social network profiles it links to have to be "verified."
> Google only shows verified profiles for sites with a verification process. In some cases, Google algorithms find information that is publicly available on the web. You can use this markup to override the information Google finds automatically, but you can't specify not to list a social profile.
They could easily have a bunch of different badges that only appear on accounts of people who pay.
A vanity item for sure, but if they had something like a 'star user' that gave you a gold star next to you name if you pay $5 a year, they'd likely make millions from it too.
But that would be average across all users. If you remove valuable users the remaining ones will be worth much less to advertisers.
There probably is some equilibrium at which point it's financially worth it but it could also piss up advertisers.
If they let you sort on it you could turn off anyone replying to your tweets that wasn't verified. A crude but probably pretty good filter for not seeing the Twitter mob.
One more thing, it's 2017 and if I am paying you money let me edit my tweets for a certain period after posting to correct spelling and grammar errors.
> Them actively searching for monetization strategies now seems to indicate an understanding that the capital well is running dry
Before they IPO'd they still had user growth. So they could get money from VCs by selling the "in 6 months we will have X million more users" story.
Now they're public, they don't have a growing user base, and the market expects them to stop losing money. They can't keep losing money forever as the VC option is gone now that they're public.
If I were to peg a time, its when they had many 3rd party applications that hooked into your feed. They killed the integrations off in favor of their own app because Advertising.
Twitter should leave the platform as is currently and clone into an alternate twitter-verse, ATV, where all kinda vices and foul language would be allowed and supported. Original Twitter would be more intolerant of trolls, related vices and foul language, outrightly deleting transgressing accounts even for incomplete, symbolized hybrids like f*$# and so forth.
Subscriptions to ATV would be based only on fake names and related credentials (including email addresses) and subscribers would be able to purchase troll units, (instanceOf)xVice units, etc.
To register, you would have to use your original Twitter email address initially and maintain an annual subscription to keep twitter-verse from disclosing your identity on Twitter. The revenue sources from ATV could be expanded further from this point.
Interesting idea. As someone who's never found Twitter interesting, I'd love to witness such mayhem. I've always felt Twitter is too focused on who is saying what, instead of what was being said by who.
Of course even if the content was more interesting, the platform would probably still hinder my curiosity. It's like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation, with little-to-no context.
The fact that this is Tweetdeck makes me believe this isn't a core initiative by Twitter's leadership, but probably a side project initiated by some individual contributors at Twitter. So this shouldn't be taken to be some big strategic shift by Twitter. IIRC Tweetdeck was also based in Europe so that accentuates the possibility that this is not a core project.
As long as the mere mortal users like me don't have to pay. I like IMDB way. They have a Pro subscription that normal users won't need. But then there's this that they are tied tightly with Amazon and what all it sells.
On the other hand they could do something like an account verification process (subscription? one time payment?) for non-celebrity users too. Maybe add a celebrity badge for the biggies or show other (something watered down) badge for non-celeb users that just says the account isn't some anonymous/throwaway account. Or sell more than 140 chars for tweets (and on the website at least they can collapse the more than 140 part).
I just hope they are not doing what Medium is trying to do.
There is a giant gap between the public client and their proprietary API.. something in the middle is the only sensible solution (50-100$ a year). I would definitely pay just for more options on getting their data.
This is going to cannibalize their gnip/API business but their pricing is in the thousands per month and any small or midsize companies have so many work arounds to get the same information it's laughable.
I love using Twitter, but what are the company doing ?
As a tech person, I understand that the platform can be difficult to scale, security, fake profiles, etc. But besides that? From an outsider, it seems like everybody is doing operations and no innovation in any area is present.
Twitter's homepage is still only a registration to closed social network like Facebook. People dont `get` twitter, and why join when it looks like just a facebook with text-limit?
Stop trying to be a social network, I dont have twitter friends.
Their trending topics are super nice, but nobody knows about it.
All the big tech companies work on speech, but not twitter ?
Tweets are mentioned all over the news, but still people are not using Twitter ? I can only imagine the amount of `Trump traffic` generated.
Their notifications simply blows!
Sorry the rant, I really want Twitter to succeed, because I dont like Facebook, I use Instagram because of family and Snap because of friends. But Twitter is like Hacker News a thing I just love.
Price that low would not make sense to them. generously assuming 4% conversion to paid accounts (DropBox had 4% at some point) from their 320M MAU, they would make just 15% of their current revenues with your model.
I still think that their best bet is to work on their ad engine. Two of the 4 biggest tech firms, GOOG and APPL, make insane revenue on ads.
I assume you meant FB? Without checking numbers, FB average revenue per user is probably triple that of Twitter. Because of FB's scale, scope, etc, I can't see Twitter getting too close to FBs numbers. But yeah that still means Twitter should potentially be able to double its revenue.
Would this change affect 'anonymous' posters? With KYC legislation anyone with a sufficient amount of followers who was unwilling to be unmasked (via payment trail) would result in removal?
I am unfamiliar with the intricacies of the verified account system, so perhaps large anonymous users are already suppressed.
I would HUGELY pay for twitter feeds that actually provide useful information. Imagine having a twitter feed that actually gives you clueful summaries and links of critical information that helps you out in your work everyday.
Honestly, I would love to pay Twitter to manage something like a Kafka queue. I would build entire apps with Twitter as my "DB". The subscription cost would come with tiered rate-metering, so I could make a small app feed for free, but a larger app would start to incur costs when I wanted to up the throughput.
I started using TweetDeck because it remained untouched by Twitter's awful changes like promoted tweets, rearranging my timeline... I hope they keep their changes to TweetDeck to a minimum.
Here is the thing : paid subs means customer service. I think Twitter doesn't want to bother with that. They'll have to get a customer service for each country in which they operate, pay some people locally to manage it, ...
Ah, fun to see the inevitable cash grab technique overvalued internet tech companies make as they drive off the stockholder cliff. All it takes is a hungry competitor. Maybe time to synthshort twitter.
