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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#571

Post by dmix »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #165
DeRock wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are probably your most profitable users to show ads to.

The people willing to pay, the heavy users, are also the people most engaged and posting content on the platform. Content that twitter needs for less heavy users to consume, bringing in eyeballs for advertisers. Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.

I doubt $8 will be the only option. I’d bet $1000 that there will be a $16 (or whatever the ROI bar is) tier to be completely ad free.

$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#572

Post by memish »

tptacek wrote: post #533
memish wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience. $8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.

We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King…

The elite have always used myriad silly ways to distance themselves from the unwashed masses throughout history.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#573

Post by paxys »

prmoustache wrote: post #525
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stephen King is addicted to Twitter? He's posted an average of 2-3 tweets per day — I wouldn't call that addicted.

That is quite a lot.

Writing 3 lines of text a day is a lot for a professional writer?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#574

Post by mym1990 »

koonsolo wrote: post #415
paxys wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it. Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte... All celebrities outside of twitter. Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT... Almost all made famous by YouTube.…

In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#575

Post by pie420 »

lamontcg wrote: post #343
conductr wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think $8-20/month of book sales are generated by King's twitter presence?

He can still tweet without a blue checkmark and people will still know who he is.

And what will he do about the hundreds of "RealStephenKing" "OfficialStephenKing" "StephenKingTwitter" accounts that will spring up and start scamming people and linking them to fake websites? How much will that cost Stephen King?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#576

Post by greysphere »

jdlshore wrote: post #569

I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter. Why? Two reasons. 1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value. 2) My Twitter account is par…

By (2) it seems like the price should be f(#followers).

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#577

Post by awinder »

memish wrote: post #529
sangnoir wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Musk was in his replies, haggling.

He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience. $8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.

“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

If you can see mocking in those 3 sentences then I can metaphorically see you popping up and down on elons lap.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#578

Post by awb »

minimaxir wrote: post #5

The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all." This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144 > We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How…

This threat is interesting. I wonder what the minimum number is of top Twitter accounts that would have to leave for the platform to lose an unrecoverable amount of its daily impressions.

For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.

If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#579

Post by bee_rider »

tptacek wrote: post #530
memish wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious. He's just butt hurt because the VIP room and symbol is being opened to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.

Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it. He's right: Twitt…

I think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#580

Post by KerrAvon »

bombcar wrote: post #127
bambax wrote: post #94

Matt Levine: > Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the price with Stephen King. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” tweeted King. “[No], they should pa…

King made a comment about price, and Musk made a (relatively) good reply - by asking "How about $8?" he's framed it as a value proposition and now you have to either say "nothing, Twitter is worthless" or you have to come back with a dollar amount. It's a good framing move. An obvious solution could be revenue-share similar to how YouTube does - post a viral tweet that generates $x in ad revenue for Twitter, receive…

At 280 characters that sort of thing would create the worst incentives possible on a platform with already terrible incentives.

Sure seems like Musk will be selling the desiccated corpse of Twitter to Verizon within a decade. On the bright side for him, he'll never have to pay tax again after writing it off.

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