Twitter Considers Subscription Fee for Tweetdeck, Unique Content (bloomberg.com) 42
Twitter is building a subscription product as a way to ease its dependence on advertising -- a plan the social network has considered for years, and one that has taken on a heightened priority given the pandemic and pressure from activist investors to accelerate growth. From a report: The majority of Twitter's revenue comes from targeted advertising, which serves up promoted posts aimed at specific groups of users. That business has grown in recent years at a slower pace than competitors like Facebook and Snap, and Twitter's slice of the digital ad market globally remains at at a lackluster 0.8%, according to EMarketer. To explore potential options outside ad sales, a number of Twitter teams are researching subscription offerings, including one using the code name "Rogue One," according to people familiar with the effort. At least one idea being considered is related to "tipping," or the ability for users to pay the people they follow for exclusive content, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are internal. Other possible ways to generate recurring revenue include charging for the use of services like Tweetdeck or advanced user features like "undo send" or profile-customization options.
Subscriptions have always offered a tantalizing alternative to advertising, but social networks have traditionally stayed free as a way to encourage user growth and engagement, which is then subsidized with paid marketing posts. Still, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said on a call with investors last year that a subscription option of some kind would offer sales "durability," and recurring revenue is more consistent than advertising spending. Segal cautioned in July that Twitter was not only "very, very early" in exploring a subscription service, but also planned to be picky about how it goes forward. "We have a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter," he said.
Subscriptions have always offered a tantalizing alternative to advertising, but social networks have traditionally stayed free as a way to encourage user growth and engagement, which is then subsidized with paid marketing posts. Still, Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said on a call with investors last year that a subscription option of some kind would offer sales "durability," and recurring revenue is more consistent than advertising spending. Segal cautioned in July that Twitter was not only "very, very early" in exploring a subscription service, but also planned to be picky about how it goes forward. "We have a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter," he said.
Oh yeah (Score:5, Funny)
That’s gonna work.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, as these big companies refuse to learn from the past, here's what happens:
a) Brand new company, has a new idea
b) idea is popular
c) they introduce ads
d) it becomes less popular
e) they introduce fees for features that were free
f) it becomes less popular
g) they paywall everything but the garbage content
h) site becomes known as the formerly-popular site that does nothing useful.
See:
AOL,ICQ,Y!IM,MSN,Skype,Slack,Discord
Livejournal,Myspace,Tumblr,Facebook, Instagram
TikTok, Whatsapp, Snapchat
Every single one
Re: (Score:2)
We had a fun run
Did we, though? I never jumped on the Twitter Train, just never really understood it. To me, it just seemed like the only thing it did was give a megaphone to anyone that wanted one. And one thing we learned fast: maybe we shouldn't go around giving megaphones to everyone.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
To me, it just seemed like the only thing it did was give a megaphone to anyone that wanted one.
What Twitter does is allow celebrities/politicians to bask in their own perpetual spotlight, and enabling folks who found their way to their 15 minutes of fame to overstay their welcome in the public eye.
If you don't really fall into either of those categories, your participation is limited to being part of the peanut gallery. You can post all you want, almost no one will ever see it; everything just gets lost in the noise.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It'll work about as well as their feed changes, interests, topics, or whatever other nonsense they're going to use next to destroy their core product
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't original to me, but - I've found Twitter works more like it used to if you don't rely on the default feed. Instead, use a search result as your Twitter landing page with the filter settings "filter:follows -filter:retweets -filter:replies" like this:
https://twitter.com/search?f=t... [twitter.com]
Although if enough people do this, I am reasonably certain Twitter will break it.
Re: (Score:2)
omg thank you! Infinitely better!
Re: (Score:2)
I was playing around with it and found this works a bit better for me:
filter:follows -filter:none
https://twitter.com/search?q=f... [twitter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Cool - I’ll give it a try!
Following all those giant corporations (Score:2)
...that suddenly asked money for their free product.
Re: Following all those giant corporations (Score:2)
It is going to work this time! I think collectively we should encourage this behavior. Maybe go so far as to suggest all accounts should be paid accounts. I will patiently wait to celebrate their successes.
Only idiots will pay (Score:2, Offtopic)
Twitter will probably not miss a beat banning paying users on frivolous grounds and it will be a complete mystery to them why it never gains traction the way Gab Pro has among its users.
Also, this whole situation highlights why we need tighter regulation of terms of service rules like "we can ban you for these reasons, but really we reserve the right to ban you at any time" should not have legal standing once money has changed. Courts normally take a dim view of "well, we can just pull out at any time and l
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike Gab, Twitter doesn't offer racism as a service, so not surprising they can't monetize it.
Re: Only idiots will pay (Score:3)
Wh yes it does!
You can happily ban people basedon reasons that imply there is such a thing as races (Literally the definition of racism) and that thar person is discriminating. Even if that person did not make that implication, and it is merey your prejudice, on top of your racism, that makes you "interpret" it that way.
You only have to know in which prejudice the corporate Gestapo, err, I mean ... moderators, ... and you agree.
Like pointing out to the actual Gestapo, that your neighbor has an awfully big n
Re: (Score:1)
Unlike Gab, Twitter doesn't offer racism as a service, so not surprising they can't monetize it.
Bullshit. Twitter is a cesspool of racism, just directed mainly toward whites. Look at Sarah Jeong's content for a good example. Search for "fuck white people" and see the kind of stuff that would get anybody else kicked out of the app stores.
I can't believe people are still pushing this narrative that Twitter does something about racism.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody has heard of Gab. Left wingers jumped onto Mastedon. Neither service replaces twitter.
One often story about how to start a failing business, is by selling your service to the cesspool. Cesspools don't want to pay for anything, and believe they have the right to foul up the service because the service tries to take a hands-off approach.
You know what happens when you don't moderate user-generated-content? You chase off everyone but the extremists.
accelerate growth? Sure... (Score:2, Interesting)
Accelerate growth? Um...no. How about become profitable? [macrotrends.net] Twitter was actually profitable for a while, but starting in 2020 it is in the red again. User numbers are stagnating. Either it's out of fashion, or censorship isn't such a great game to play after all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: accelerate growth? Sure... (Score:3)
They will never be profitabe.
Because think about it: They got nothing of value whatsoever. A blog...with a charactter limit. Oh, wow! I bet Tesla is jealous of that invention! --.--
All it is, is a Ponzi scheme.
More growth means more dumb investors, means more money for them to funnel off.
Nobody cares about its profitability.
Or that it ruins society.
Re: (Score:2)
What is going out of fashion is the creepy monetize every bit of information you can obtain about your users business model. If you don't want to be the product, they're going to expect you to pay for the product. They've either gotta monetize their users, bill them, or cease to exist. There's no free lunch.
That's the thing about all these folks who keep crying "censorship". If it was a profitable business model to let users shit all over your platform with conspiracy theories and toxic behavior, someo
The interesting question is not (Score:2)
Re: The interesting question is not (Score:1)
Cyber cyber? Cyber cyber cyber!
Cybercyber cyber CYBER!
Cyber Regards.
Cyber C. Cybercyber of Cyber
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. Contrary to both the extreme left and extreme right's common belief that they're being censored. It's just not true.
Roughly 50% of right-wing posters on twitter were bots. Compared to like 3% for left-wing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtkQKMHVcAA6Px5?format=jpg&name=large
Re: (Score:2)
Donations are an easy win (Score:2)
And they will notice... (Score:2)
That nothing of value is contained within them.
Nobody will pay, to get even deeper inside the cesspit and take a big gulp.
Hootsuite is closest competitor (Score:3)
Tweetdeck can be useful if one needs to schedule tweets, which is highly recommended for anyone that has a brand that needs to build its engagement. The only problem being that Hootsuite provides that functionality too, and has a freemium account.
It would behoove Twitter to make Tweetdeck freemium if they want to retain it's current user base. Maybe they have thought of some extra features that can bring extra value to Tweetdeck?
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds a lot easier for Twitter to just cancel Hootsuite's API access.
Re: (Score:2)
Have they thought of making Tweetdeck not hot garbage? Maybe I'd pay for that.
I use it, but only because it's better than their default experience. But trying to catch up on a list is super difficult because it'll drop out dozens of tweets in the middle for no reason, and I can't turn it off. Then when you click to load more, it jumps you to a place in the timeline that you can't identify and you end up lost. Click on a picture to make it larger? Well, that works sometimes, other times, it forces you to loa
Goodbye Twitter (Score:1)
You want to censor me and then ask me to pay for what used to be free? Thanks, I'm good. Hope you go out of business.
When you build an empire on speech... (Score:2)
and then decide to become the one of the most famous censorship and deplatforming jerks on the planet, driving away a vast swath of your users, you gotta find some new way to bring in the cash needed to fuel the yachts and planes.
At some point people will wake up and realize that Jack Dorsey built NOTHING, and his big idea was not even that interesting - short messages squeezed into single IP packets. Plenty of coders could implement that if they bothered to think to do it, most probably just were too busy