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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#441

Post by mjfl »

sumeno wrote: post #427
at-fates-hands wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But other people use Twitter in different ways. Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released. Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They…

If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too

and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#442

Post by paulpauper »

memish wrote: post #202

A 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…

>Bots get taxed.

Crypto scammers make so much that paying $8 is pocket change if it means having scam tweets be more visible.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#443

Post by seydor »

keneda7 wrote: post #53
thorum wrote: post #24

Blue checkmarks are not just about verification and extra features. They’re a status symbol. They mean you are cool and notable enough to deserve one according the shadowy and mysterious Twitter checkmark committee. If they become a commodity that anyone with a little money can buy, they lose a big part of their appeal to the average person.

You hit the nail on the head in your post. The mysterious Twitter checkmark committee that got to gatekeep who could be in their group. Then people (probably the committee itself) started pushing the idea that blue check marks are more reliable and trustworthy. I am not okay with a random group of people being able to decide whether or not someone is trustworthy. I prefer the checkmark to mean this person pays x doll…

i actually think checkmarks was twitter's great strength. it made them look like a medium with ideology and editorialization, which attracted a lot of ideologically committed people. Twitter used the checkmark to gatekeep twitterers and as a weapon. they ridiculously "unverified" people (as if those people lost their identity or sth). It was all about signaling. Now it's just something you can buy

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#444

Post by tlhunter »

Only disabling half of the ads makes sense from a business point of view. Most likely, the users who are the best audience for an ad (in the sense that they have spare money and might purchase an advertised product) are the ones that would actually spend money disable ads.

There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#445

Post by arkades »

paxys wrote: post #322
dan-robertson wrote: post #285

The 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 c…

Stephen King’s tweet on that topic, to summarize:

“ $20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304?s...

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#446

Post by encryptluks2 »

tommica wrote: post #315
dan-robertson wrote: post #285

The 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 think it is convenient. These people have a website or verified profile on Google to already determine which social media profiles belong to them. All the blue checkmark will tell me in the future is these people are dumb enough to pay for snake oil.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#447

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

cmelbye wrote: post #104
danpalmer wrote: post #14

The 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. I don't think so. Twitter's ARPU from advertising in Q2 2022 was around $4.50. ARPU from advertising in the US was more than $14. Users likely to subscribe at $8/month (power users in western countries) are more valuable than average for advertising. No ads for $8/month would probably be a very bad idea.

Twitter Q2 average daily monetizable users: 237.8 million

Q2 revenue: $1.18 billion

Q2 revenue per monetizable user: $4.96

Revenue per user if they're paying $8 a month is $24 per quarter (there's 3 months in a quarter!)

That's definitely more than the profitability of the average user. If I got the numbers wrong then please show me how.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#448

Post by oska »

enumjorge wrote: post #395
dan-robertson wrote: post #285

The 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…

To your point here's a tweet from Stephen King that was making the rounds where he protests the idea that he should be paying Twitter instead of the reverse: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144

Where does Stephen King go if he's not on twitter ?

(Genuine question, not rhetorical)

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#449

Post by TeMPOraL »

soulofmischief wrote: post #403
dan-robertson wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be v…

Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc. Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek…

> Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.

And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says:

> Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity

So that addresses this complaint.

> If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.

Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"?

Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#450

Post by encryptluks2 »

mjfl wrote: post #441
sumeno wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too

and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them

Yes because most scammers provide their real information when scamming
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