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Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ

blog.twitter.com

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Re: Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ

#42

Post by angulardragon03 »

jsnell wrote: post #8
angulardragon03 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you'd also get ad-free access to Twitter itself, which I would certainly consider paying for. Considering the annual per-user revenue is ~ 12USD [1], this seems like something that would be financially interesting to Twitter. [1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/forecast-of-the-day%3A-twitt...

That's worldwide. Their revenue per US user from ads is $4/month. Selling an ad-free subscription for $3/month can't work for them just from those numbers, and it gets worse when you consider that Apple will be taking 30% of the latter but not the former.

You can subscribe outside of the App Store, and I’d likely pay more than $4 a month to see only tweets, without ads. The only thing holding me back from paying for something like TweetBot is that Twitter has intentionally hobbled notifications for third-party apps.

Re: Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ

#47

Post by ProfessorLayton »

I find it quite astonishing that Twitter is gating UX improvements like Undo/Edit and Reader view behind a paywall — both are problems of their own doing!

- Undo/Edit is just basic functionality being sold for money.

- Reader View wouldn't be necessary if twitter threads weren't hot garbage to begin with.

I really don't mind paying for a good product, and overall I like twitter the most out of all the other big social sites. However, what I've been seeing for years now is that they refuse to build the best product possible for most of their users, and they would rather stagnate than improve it "for free".

Re: Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ

#48

Post by Andrex »

- Doesn't remove ads on Twitter itself

- Is not compatible with any news paywalls (they just strip ads out of already free-to-access articles)

- Edit Tweet isn't Edit Tweet. It's an option to delay your tweets by 60 seconds. After that, you cannot Edit Tweet. "Slow Tweet" is more accurate but probably less marketable.

Even if I were still using Twitter, and even though I support journalism when I can (paywalls for a few sites, etc.), I still wouldn't pay $3 for this.

I think Twitter has a lot of work left to do on their business model. This move, IMO, is at least 5 years too late (if not 8-10). Considering Twitter has been unprofitable for most of its life, including in 2020[0], it's only now that they're thinking about alternatives to their ad network.

0. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...

Re: Twitter Blue is now available in the US and NZ

#49

Post by Andrex »

This idea would probably be a headache to implement, but has any service tried something like charging $1/$x for specific features? Feels like Twitter would be the prime candidate.

Ad-free article access could be $1.

"""Editing""" tweets could be $1.

Ad-free Twitter could be $4-5 (as that's what Twitter makes per US user per month via ads).

Etc.

IMO Patreon has already broken through the mental mode of "sign up for multiple sub-$5 things and have a single bill at the end of the month."

Any big services out there doing a-la-carte premium features?

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