Yeah this is reasonable. For those who want or need it $100/yr is affordable but more than most would pay just to have it but don't need it. Off course it's mostly a mechanism to strengthen the bottom line but if it's value for money then go ahead.
Twitter Blue for $8/Month
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#322The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for…
That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every commercial product and service is an example of that.
Yup. I'm gonna keep drumming this up: most markets today are supplier-driven. The "barrier to having a good experience" gets higher, and the experience gets worse, and there's shit all you can do about it, because you're only able to choose out of what's on the market, and the market isn't serving lower barrier / better experience options it did a month, year or decade ago.
> and the market isn't serving lower barrier / better experience options it did a month, year or decade ago.
That's irrelevant, and very often false. But the options offered by the market at any given time are generally better at higher price points, which is, oddly, exactly what the commenter upthread was outraged by.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#324"Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply. Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"? How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
It's pretty well-known for traditional television broadcasts, right? Shows are edited and even scripted specifically to provide the right amount of slots for ads.
Yeah, that's why I don't watch TV any more.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#325Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#326"Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply. Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"? How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
> Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"? Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
They announce this is to users as part of the offering. But of course it's measurable.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#327A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well: Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one. It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money. https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033 The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality. The billion…
> It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
If 1% of twitter accounts pay then that is $400M/yr which is a decent chunk of revenue for twitter. It is absolutely about making money.
All the government and official accounts along with CEOs, actors and other public personas will be almost forced to pay up. The existing blue check marks who don't pay up will probably be made up for 10x by wannabe youtube personalities that pay for it.
The "blue check establishment journos" are also almost all upper middle class liberals, there's not much of a morality story here other than PMCs and capitalists having a squabble.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#328The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for…
I guess I am an outlier in this, but I don't think I have a single "famous" person that I follow - maybe some bigger figures in a niche area, but the people that have the blue mark are not the draw for me. But when I do search for them, it is convenient to see the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for.
I don't follow famous people. Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#329The good: Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change. The bad: $8 is…
> $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. Than an average user. But if you are a power user, you have just sent a valuable marketing signal. > Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means Strong disagree. Twitter currently only exists as a bullhorn for already famous people, or a few lucky early adopters.
I dont think early adopters mattered for years already.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you could have misread this interaction more than you already have.
I can see how you think that if you're not familiar with how blue checks are awarded and what they mean to the nobility class of Twitter.
I think you're misreading how much an elderly ultra-famous and quite rich author gives a shit about his "status" on some stupid website like Twitter.
I think he was insulted at the idea of having to pay anything to be verified on the platform, when both his presence and his being verified are helpful to twitter and make twitter money, even if they do also drive some book sales for him. I took it as his saying that he'd respond to such an insult (being asked to pay) by simply leaving, because Twitter and whatever little extra money it's making him don't really matter much to him.
I doubt he's alone in that thinking. Though sure, some celebs, most or all brands (that's who they should be soaking with monthly charges), and the media will stick around until/unless the platform enters clear decline and a viable alternative emerges.