9 ms·

Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-raise-the-limit-to-2

• danielhooper 10y ago
  > how many would pay $1/month to be able to communicate their points more clearly? My guess is less than 10,000.
  • silvestrov 10y ago
    50 countries with 200 persons each? I'd say more than 10.000 in just USA alone. Even if you up it to $5 a month. Twitter is used a lot by those who use twitter.
    • wapz 10y ago
      I'd say 10,000 from businesses in the USA alone. A lot of companies use twitter as their makeshift tech support and public image. $1/month for a company is completely irrelevant to their spending.
  • sfgeek 10y ago
    Me. If I still used Twitter. Heck, I tweet maybe 5 times a month and I'd pay that. $1 a month is so cheap I would notice.
    • smileysteve 10y ago
      You'd likely notice the first time it asks you for payment.
      • Sidetalker 10y ago
        On iOS it takes a single TouchID auth and a few message prompts to sign up for a recurring subscription - you won't ever be asked for payment again. I'm certain Android is similarly streamlined.
  • apetresc 10y ago
    You must be joking.
  • paulcole 10y ago
    I think you're underestimating the number of businesses who could be convinced that $12 a year is like the marketing equivalent of Pascal's Wager.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• tenkabuto 10y ago
  > Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore. I do, yet I still think this should be experimented with. If an account I follow tends to post longer messages, I can deal with seeing only the first line of them.
  • bigiain 10y ago
    I suspect the intersection of a) people who care about Twitter, b) who use twitter via sms, c) people who do not have phones that hide/abstract away multipart sms so they've got 300+ character messaging - is so small it'd be less expensive for Twitter to buy all three of them a new iPhone every 2 years instead of hold one meeting trying to solve the problem ;-) (Note: I'm not convinced long-tweets are "the killer idea" others seem to think - like someone else put it, the reader's attention is the limited resource, not the service's ability to publish characters. I don't scroll thru Wordpress/LiveJournal/LongReads on the train or while waiting for coffee...
• aphextron 10y ago
  >Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.
  • andromeduck 10y ago
    Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.
    • gonzo 10y ago
      first 140 chars are free. 141st and subsequent costs $1 ea
    • jpalomaki 10y ago
      This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each. Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.
  • gregmac 10y ago
    People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets). The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).
    • euyyn 10y ago
      But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.
      • 10y ago
• m-p-3 10y ago
  > Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore. And RCS is being deployed. Eventually the character limit will be irrelevant anyway.
• platz 10y ago
  The stratechery folks have said something akin to that Twitter is unsalvageable that this point from a growth perspective because they've already lost most of their potential customers. People who tried their product and walked away. If these were fresh potential customers it would be one thing, but convincing someone to come back who already tried your product is much harder
  • kbenson 10y ago
    It doesn't help that those of us that walked away still continuously hear stories about how Twitter can be a cesspool.
    • amagumori 10y ago
      In what ways do people see twitter as a cesspool? Im just genuinely curious because I get a lot of value out of twitter. It's a great way for me to be exposed to new work from artists, finding circles of people with overlapping niche interests, reading political dialogue and analysis, funny stuff...etc
      • kbenson 10y ago
        To be fair, people using twitter don't generally call it a cesspool, and reading between the lines you know they must get value out of it if they continue to use it, but there's the constant "you have to have thick skin" statements from people about how it can occasionally be toxic. As someone not in the social network, what it looks like is that there may be some value to me if I get involved, but I'll likely have to deal with bullshit to do so, and the perception is that the bullshit is much more assured than the value. Whether this is valid, or more specifically whether the relative assessments of each feature are accurate, is unknown, but that's how it feels.
        • LoSboccacc 10y ago
          Twitter, as Linkedin, suffers from a poor content to marketing ratio. I do use it to follow some devs, but every time I step out the established circle into an hashtag or suggestion is nothing but marketing bots oneupping each other. On the other social is easier to have real social interaction, while talking on twitter is more like people screaming in a crowd plus there are these big tv set all over the place loudness to the max splourting ads. It was a nice way to grow an asymmetric network built on shared interest as opposed to shared connections when there where genuine people on it but I hardly even login anymore.
• Gustomaximus 10y ago
  Trial 1c per character over 140. So many prole would want to finish a sentence for a few cents that would hesitate for $1/mth. Then have a $3 (or something smaller) minimum so people instantly have credit for future use to train behavior for some time. This would also give credit cards for future organisation and easy purchases. For power users 100 character a month would be nothing so it would up earnings there. Then initially launch with a 'charity' test month. This helps get people using and people accepting longer tweets with good will. Doing a charity month will help reduce the invariable haters of anything new, and offset bad-will if trial goes down like a lead balloon. And then monitise assuming trial goes well
• IAmGraydon 10y ago
  The idea is interesting, but you a forgetting something. In cases of extremely low cost (like $1), sometimes the payment process itself is seen as more costly than the payment itself. In other words, people may be willing to spend $1 for an additional sentence, but would they be willing to get their wallet, pull out the card, type in the number, name, billing address and security code? I bet not. Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that.
  • wingerlang 10y ago
    > Beyond that, using a card would force users to attach a real identity to their account, even if it's not public. A lot of people wouldn't like the idea of that. I think the majority of consumers have zero issues with it. And the people who do and ALSO care about identity/anonymity definitely could just get some pre-paid card.
• xellisx 10y ago
  Why not just 255?