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Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but hear me out. 1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Pro
by sumitgt 10y ago
Turn the entire business model 180 degrees. This might be very radical, but hear me out.
1) Creating a twitter profile (with tweeting privileges) costs $5. Profiles without tweeting privileges are free.
2) Once you have 10000 followers, you need to pay additional $$ per year. This fees increases exponentially as you gain more followers. Eg. Famous people pay a lot. Unless this $ is paid, the follower count caps up and the follow button disappears from the profile.
3) Stop considering no of active user profiles as a metric entirely.
4) Regular non-famous people can create profiles (that do not have option for others to follow), but can follow famous paying users for free.
5) If a normal non-famous person wants to chime into the conversation, they pay a one-time fee of $5 to become a paid user. Now they can tweet and have followers. If they ever get too famous, they might have to pay again to unlock ability to have 10000+ followers.
This way you try to charge the users who actually have the money to spend. Let's admit, people with high follower counts like politicians do gain a lot from twitter, and would probably pay for un-mediated access to the population.
This also fixes the problem of junk / troll accounts.
- edblarney 10y ago"1) Creating a twitter profile costs $5." It's over then. 99% of users don't care about Twitter that much to pay a dime. Can't charge old users, and growth is already small anyhow. Only about 1% of these various service entities will pay. And the number of 'truly famous people' on Twitter is very small. Some kind of 'unit payment' scenario would be feasible, but only if it were truly seamless, and no such paradigm exists yet. The 'problem' is not with revenue, it's with growth and engagement.
- sumitgt 10y agoEdited. I meant creating profiles with tweeting privileges will cost money. I think sometimes we need to rethink what growth and engagement means. In my model, Twitter does not rely on advertising. Famous people might still be interested, because you allow them un-fettered access to disperse their message directly to the population without any filters and trolls bothering them.