811–820 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely wrongheaded. If anything, twitter should be paying anonymous users. Bluechecks are the ones who use twitter to build their personal brand, sell books, etc..
Do you not know who Steven King is? It's certainly easier to google him than to come up with a take like this in response.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
As if King cant pay 20 dollars.
It's like charging actors to act, or charging writers to write.
Without people like King, twitter has no chance of surviving long-term. It does nothing special. It was simply in the right place at the right time.
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…
> Half as many ads $8/month and you don’t even get ads removed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is bluffing.
Are you saying he won’t leave or that he will accept paying money to Elon Musk for his checkmark?
Not sure if he cares about the blue checkmark enough to pay, but he is rich enough not to care. His net worth is half a billion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $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.
On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.
That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's such... odd behavior. For sure Stephen King who has a net worth of $500 million dollars does not mean "the price is too high". If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona…
For King and many other blue checks it's a status symbol. A way for the Lord to distinguish himself from the peasants. King (aptly named) would be happier if it was a Veblen good that cost $100,000/mo, which he could afford, but the peasants can't. Elon is mocking King and his status symbol by saying "fine, how about $8?", which from the King's perspective, is worse than $20 because even more peasants will have it. T…
The entire point of these things were so that it was an indication that these people are who they say they are: experts and celebrities.
This absolute loon wants to charge the people who are the only reason that twitter even still exists.