Twitter will launch a paid subscription to super-followers

Twitter is expected to become one of the first social networks to offer its users a paid subscription. At a recent virtual event for investors, the company announced that it plans to launch a paid usage model for super followers. The service will allow tweeters themselves to charge a fixed monthly fee for accessing additional content, such as a newsletter subscription, exposure to exclusive tweets, group participation available only to payers (a new tool called Communities) or a special profile tag.

“Funding models that enable talented content creators to profit from their audiences,” they said on Twitter, “motivate them to continue to create great content that their audiences love. But our focus is also to ensure we develop our product so that it increases positive discourse … and lowers behavioral incentives.” Toxic. “

The updates are not available yet, but the post itself embodies a revolution both for Twitter itself and in the wider world of social media. Since its founding in 2006, the social network has made almost no changes to the platform, whether out of a guiding principle or due to neglect by its senior executives. The significant changes she has made to the user experience over the years can be gleaned with tweezers. For example, doubling the maximum number of characters in a tweet to 240 somewhere in 2017, or adding a feature called Fleets last November, a local version of the “Stories” function created by Snapshot in 2013, and copied quite a bit Fast to any other social network, like Instagram (2016) and then Facebook (2017). Well-wishers may even add to this short list the search bar they put on Twitter in 2008.

In the decade and a half in which it has existed, Twitter has made investors and analysts wonder about the nature of its business model or whether it even exists. Like many start-ups, the company did not seek revenue or profits in its early years, but focused on growth. “At this point, given we have a lot of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to be distracted trying to put the finishing touches on the revenue plan,” said Biz Stone, who co-founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2011. Dorsey himself, who now serves as the company’s CEO, was at the time a little less political and much more enigmatic than Stone: “Twitter’s business model focuses around serendipity” (discovery by chance), he explained.

Stone echoed the dominant attitude in the technology sector even today: first build an audience and then think about how to make money from it. The problem is that the company has not been able to understand in the last five years why it has exhausted the growth of its users. Whether it’s because of the outdated product, the competitive market or the conservative management, the percentage of users of the platform has barely grown since the first quarter of 2015. Since then, the company has added only about 30 million new users. Today it has 330 million monthly users representing 9% growth over five years. For comparison, Facebook has 2.7 billion users, Instagram 1.2 billion users and the young Tiktok about 700 million users.

There is a stagnation in the user base, but even those who have the company have a hard time making a profit. The result: Twitter has so far failed to generate growing revenue or net profit for investors. This is well reflected in the share price, which is currently trading at $ 73, not far from the record price of $ 63 after it was issued in 2013. “We admit we were not innovative,” Dorsey said last week, reminding the enclave that as a manager he had managed to miss any opportunity or trend that could have put the company back on a growth trajectory.

But while executives were not preoccupied with revenue and profits, investors and analysts ruled that Twitter was full of unrealized potential. The perception around the company was that it has an excellent product, which attracts loyal users. Analysts have believed for years that the road to money must go through advertising, Internet traffic or the Holy Grail – paid subscriptions. Although the company substantially refused to participate in the discussion, it eventually incorporated ads within the feed, according to a model that also fails to generate significant revenue for it or provide an encouraging forecast.

The new changes are trying to leverage Twitter branding as a personal broadcast network for the masses and riders across an ever-increasing approach that sees quality content as a paid product. In recent years models like Patron and even Substack have allowed content creators to receive direct payment from their audience: creators maintain a closed circle of quality content, giving them control over the audience, archive and intellectual property. To back up a evolving paid content service move, Twitter has made a number of significant acquisitions in recent weeks, including from Revue Newsletter Management and the Breaker podcast service.

The problem is that Twitter, like most other social networks, has over the years become a sewer of misinformation, hatred, racism and incitement. Although the company works, perhaps more than the competition, to monitor the content and suspend users, it is still a virtual space that is mostly filled with waste and not quality content. It did not happen by mistake. At no stage in the history of Twitter has it tried to build itself as a platform to which one comes to consume quality and trusted content, which may one day come and be worth paying for. It has provided the product for free and without any control to gain as many users as possible. Suffice it to compare it to YouTube which provides its popular content creators with well-equipped studios and skilled professionals.

The result is another social network, where people get angry, exchange conspiracy theories, share water and do not feel obligated to talk. This approach was evident immediately after Twitter’s latest announcement of the expected changes as a wave of users, still waiting for the “edit” button, began flooding the web with the #RIPTwitter hashtag, indicating that they have no intention of paying for content.

But the real question is whether Twitter will be able to generate revenue directly from its users so that this will have a real impact on its bottom line. History is not encouraging, Twitter is a conservative company and too slow to respond, and almost every new product or feature it has released, it has done too little, too late and when the market is saturated with competitors who have done it before. Its success can reinforce the current trend of moving to closed, and perhaps even supervised, content worlds.