What I love most is that the new CEO of Twitter is front and center making a major product and pricing announcement to the entire customer base within 4 days of buying the company. That’s awesome execution, baby! Not to mention the best type of product marketing imaginable.
Twitter Blue for $8/Month
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#762What I love most is that the new CEO of Twitter is front and center making a major product and pricing announcement to the entire customer base within 4 days of buying the company. That’s awesome execution, baby! Not to mention the best type of product marketing imaginable.
I mean, that seems reminiscent of Trump style politics but sure.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful. Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creator…
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…
I can't find a reference off the top of my head but earlier this year I saw a journalist post their engagement data on Twitter and it was shockingly bad. If I recall correctly they had hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of click-throughs to their website.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#764The 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…
Creating YouTube content takes considerable effort besides just having interesting things to say.
Twitter on the other hand is just text. Anyone can write tweets.
Not anyone can post YouTube videos.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...why? Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content. That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter…
Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what compels people to use Twitter. I thought the few people in question use Twitter as a convenient tool to communicate with wide audiences (i.e. marketing) and the rest are mostly especially dedicated followers who want to be marketed to. Are there actually people who primarily use Twitter for "content"? Are the blue checkmark people (i.e. celebrities) even the ones ge…
I’m a research scientist and mostly use it to keep up with people working in similar fields.
There’s certainly some marketing (“Check out our new paper”, “My lab is hiring”, etc), but it’s not particularly top-down; everybody does it to some extent. It’s also mixed in with actual scientific discussion, lab “hacks”, and some silly banter/blowing off steam. All in all, it’s been pretty helpful for me careerwise. I think I’ve gotten more useful advice about grant writing and papers to read than many more formal mentorship arrangements.
There are a few “blue checks”, but they’re mostly a) early adopters or b) people with some kind of public presence. As far as I can tell, neither I nor most others care about the checkmark per se. I talked about my research (twice!) with John Carmack and it was cool to know that it was really the Doom Guy, but I think I probably would have engaged with anybody equally curious about my work.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although you’re technically correct, I think there’s a qualitative difference here. Traditional advertising is priced on number of impressions. As a result, publishers are incentivized to juice engagement numbers. Practically speaking, that means outrage-generating content and similar garbage. This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second clas…
I’m an advertiser and I think you understate how ad platforms incentivize quality content (via quality scores that affect price) and overstate how this twitter blue proposal would do so. Also you greatly simplify how current advertising works. It’s not anywhere as simple as you describe.
Again, although you’re technically correct, I don’t think it changes my overall point.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#767Earlier 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.…
Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#768He's just rearranging deck chairs on the fail whale. There is no way the investors are going to make back their money. Just sell it to Microsoft or take it public again, take the write down, and try to find something that you can fix.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT ... > Almost all made famous by YouTube. I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.
Justin Bieber came to prominence via YouTube.
Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
They _should_ have the corp version. Corp accounts (@corp_name) should be like $1000/year or something like that (probably could charge $10,000 and more). Nike, Coke, Dell, Disney, etc.
You know — that is a genuinely good idea. It's easily the best monetization idea for Twitter I've heard, especially amidst the last decade of nonsense about "brand advertising" and "blue checkmarks."
Just one thing — add a couple more zeros. $100k/yr is not unreasonable for an enterprise offering here. They could introduce all kinds of B2B features for companies that want to use Twitter as a support forum (or, given Twitter's popularity, are forced into using it as a support forum).
Off the top of my head — things like rolling up different sub-accounts under one main corporate account, formalizing the ability for multiple support staff to work one account (and charge per seat!), having deeper integration with Zendesk and other ticketing systems, extracting metrics and showing dashboards for how support (and sentiment) is doing, introducing some AI/ML to help companies match Twitter accounts of their customers to internal customer IDs, enabling ML-powered DMing of targeted offers, introducing chatbots that can be trained to field support queries over DM, etc, etc.
Anyway, it's a really good idea. Maybe you should've bought Twitter.