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Twitter explores subscription-based option
- mrmondo 10y agoI'd pay $30/yr to twitter to keep the service running, in return I'd expect the option to opt-out of ads.
- dirtyaura 10y agoPrice that low would not make sense to them. generously assuming 4% conversion to paid accounts (DropBox had 4% at some point) from their 320M MAU, they would make just 15% of their current revenues with your model. I still think that their best bet is to work on their ad engine. Two of the 4 biggest tech firms, GOOG and APPL, make insane revenue on ads.
- skinnymuch 10y agoI assume you meant FB? Without checking numbers, FB average revenue per user is probably triple that of Twitter. Because of FB's scale, scope, etc, I can't see Twitter getting too close to FBs numbers. But yeah that still means Twitter should potentially be able to double its revenue.
- Ros2 10y agoThere is a giant gap between the public client and their proprietary API.. something in the middle is the only sensible solution (50-100$ a year). I would definitely pay just for more options on getting their data. This is going to cannibalize their gnip/API business but their pricing is in the thousands per month and any small or midsize companies have so many work arounds to get the same information it's laughable.
- cft 10y agoTwitter does not support the 10bn market cap. 3bn maybe, but it's overpriced by 300%
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- SteveNuts 10y agoMaybe if they had some CRM functions for brands to use, maybe using machine learning to automatically pick up on nasty tweets about your brand and add them to a queue of cases to investigate. Seems like a lot of people turn to twitter to complain about products/services when things go wrong, give companies an easy way to handle those?
- nerdwaller 10y agoYeah I built an integration like this for a hackathon at work (we did call center software, e.g. we serve the people that serve people). The system categorized tweets so that the customer could respond to issues and such - the obvious value add is it's unlikely a customer will come to you directly, but they'd likely complain online. Somewhat related I've noticed that some of the really successful open source projects meet people where they are and are really accessible via channels like Twitter (SpringBoot and Auth0 are good examples of this, from my experience).
- softawre 10y agoI also work on call center software. Care to say which company?
- abricot 10y agoWhy don't you start?
- nerdwaller 10y agoI left a year or so back, but it's based in IN (USA) and just got bought by a place in SF (USA). If there was any overlap that's probably enough to identify it :)
- hkmurakami 10y agoBasically the entire Japanese OSS community runs on Twitter. It's their medium of choice for communication, which is great since discussions are very very open (it's facilitated by their language's much higher information density compared to English, probably ~5x). The vast majority of the contributors are eager to talk to users around the world, so if you use a project with a known Japanese maintainer, try shooting them a message on Twitter. Their English may be broken at times but you can usually understand what they're saying pretty easily.
- dawnerd 10y agoI run a small horror news publication and we'd love to spend money on twitter. We've tossed some money towards ads and have had a nice return from it. What we can't figure out is how much money it'll take before they'll verify us. Maybe that's something they could just offer to businesses without having to submit a request and ultimately be denied for whatever reason. I think it's fair to say I'd be very interested in throwing more money at twitter.
- crizzooo 10y agoAnd what is the reason your business would benefit by being verified? I am unfamiliar with the concept I guess
- dawnerd 10y agoPretty simple, people see the checkmark and value you more. Also stand out in search and some threaded conversions.
- acangiano 10y agoI suspect it'll be a much weaker signal when every business has it.
- Navarr 10y agoGoogle at least claims that when showing your business in the knowledge graph, the social network profiles it links to have to be "verified." > Google only shows verified profiles for sites with a verification process. In some cases, Google algorithms find information that is publicly available on the web. You can use this markup to override the information Google finds automatically, but you can't specify not to list a social profile. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-site https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/enhance-sit...
- hsod 10y agoSo that your users know you are who you say you are
- overcast 10y agoThis should have been explored in its prime, not on its downfall.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoWhen was Twitter's "prime"? And how does it compare to today?
- bluthru 10y agoPersonally before it enabled inline images which turned it into a firehose of reaction gifs.
- HeavenBanned 10y agoI'm starting to fail to see the difference between 4chan and Twitter at this point. Twitter is just 4chan with avatars.
- JamesLeonis 10y agoIf I were to peg a time, its when they had many 3rd party applications that hooked into your feed. They killed the integrations off in favor of their own app because Advertising.
- Nition 10y agoYeah, or when they started.
- 10y ago
- rmason 10y agoI'd gladly pay $25 a year just to have a verified account. Be worth $10-20 million a year in earnings anytime they choose to simply turn it on.
- superioritycplx 10y agoAre you willing to post negative replies on the President's tweets? Seriously, go look yourself. It's all no names with blue check marks.
- imron 10y agoThey could easily have a bunch of different badges that only appear on accounts of people who pay. A vanity item for sure, but if they had something like a 'star user' that gave you a gold star next to you name if you pay $5 a year, they'd likely make millions from it too.
- egypturnash 10y agoOr how about * an I Support Twitter! star on your name/icon/whatever * AND NO ADS EVER
- rexf 10y agoYup, definitely room for a "Twitter Prime" subscription. Some vanity icon & no ads. On the plus side, users who pay Twitter monthly are less likely to be throwaway accounts.
- ganfortran 10y agoSounds great, would love to see fewer shitposts and spam. #BuildThePayWall
- elvinyung 10y agoSuper hypothetically, Twitter could monetize something like Reddit Gold, basically as a form of "super upvote/retweet".
- tyingq 10y agoI'd pay if it had the effect where anyone mentioned with @whoever in the tweet would then have it pinned on their page, given enough gold.
- koolba 10y agoMy initial thought is this would only be used to spam/harass people but if it's tied to actual money maybe it'd be enough of a barrier to be semi usable.
- tyingq 10y agoThey could sell antigold too. Or maybe semi hide it behind a "related gold tweets" tab. I assume there's a pretty bad dark side, but it would enable a "premium customer support" of sorts...A very visible complaints box. Would have been interesting in the Susan Fowler tweet. Would have cost Uber quite a bit of antigold to take that down
- Cyph0n 10y agoThat's actually a pretty smart idea. But the subscription idea seems pretty weak to me. I mean, how many people actually have 1 million+ followers to pay $99/month?
- goatherders 10y agoKylie Jenner would be 1k per month Ronaldo would be 5k per month Trump would be 2600 per month There are a few
- OriginalPenguin 10y ago
- recursive 10y agoI guess app.net was on to something after all.
- BucketSort 10y agotstg
- argonaut 10y agoThe fact that this is Tweetdeck makes me believe this isn't a core initiative by Twitter's leadership, but probably a side project initiated by some individual contributors at Twitter. So this shouldn't be taken to be some big strategic shift by Twitter. IIRC Tweetdeck was also based in Europe so that accentuates the possibility that this is not a core project.
- concernedctzn 10y agoThis must be part of the reason why you can't view profiles with_replies now if you're not logged in
- berns 10y agoIt still works if you clear the cookies or open in incognito mode.
- blazespin 10y agoI would HUGELY pay for twitter feeds that actually provide useful information. Imagine having a twitter feed that actually gives you clueful summaries and links of critical information that helps you out in your work everyday.
- goatherders 10y ago$1/month for every 10k followers over your first 10k. Small price to pay for "fame". 1,000,000 followers is $99/month. You don't think Trump and the Kardashians would pay that for the voice it gives them to promote whatever they promote?
- rorosaurus 10y agoInteresting concept. Wouldn't this encourage people to create spam accounts to follow people to force them to pay / pay more?
- goatherders 10y agoMaybe. But then that would be the first time a Twitter had a spam problem to deal with. ;)
- RileyJames 10y agoThere's no direct benefit to the spammer. More effort would go into pruning spammers (from those who are paying, spam protection services) and if twitter credited their account for any payments related to an account marked as spam it seems like it could work. Definitely an interesting model.
- cuchoi 10y agoYou are right but Twitter benefit from Spammer and the people that sells followers. They have no incentives to go after them. Any person that uses Twitter knows that many of their followers are bots/Spam.
- lazyjones 10y agoThat's very similar to the situation with click-based advertising in search engines. I wouldn't say that it isn't working for everyone involved (except those who pay the ads).
- ekianjo 10y ago
- simplehuman 10y agoFinally. I would easily pay 100 a year for this
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI started using TweetDeck because it remained untouched by Twitter's awful changes like promoted tweets, rearranging my timeline... I hope they keep their changes to TweetDeck to a minimum.
- guyzero 10y agoI'll pay $500 a month for an all-you-can-ban button.
- balladeer 10y agoAs long as the mere mortal users like me don't have to pay. I like IMDB way. They have a Pro subscription that normal users won't need. But then there's this that they are tied tightly with Amazon and what all it sells. On the other hand they could do something like an account verification process (subscription? one time payment?) for non-celebrity users too. Maybe add a celebrity badge for the biggies or show other (something watered down) badge for non-celeb users that just says the account isn't some anonymous/throwaway account. Or sell more than 140 chars for tweets (and on the website at least they can collapse the more than 140 part). I just hope they are not doing what Medium is trying to do.
- carsongross 10y agoInteresting. gab.ai just added subscriptions as well.
- LeicaLatte 10y agoI have a completely different take on where twitter needs to go. The YC application I am submitting today is based on a twitter-like.
- camus2 10y agoHere is the thing : paid subs means customer service. I think Twitter doesn't want to bother with that. They'll have to get a customer service for each country in which they operate, pay some people locally to manage it, ...
- DaniloDias 10y agoNo sale.
- LeicaLatte 10y agoWelcome to 1998. http://www.nathanargenta.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Ebay-Seller-Account-Profile-3_2015.png http://www.nathanargenta.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Ebay...
- JamesLeonis 10y agoHonestly, I would love to pay Twitter to manage something like a Kafka queue. I would build entire apps with Twitter as my "DB". The subscription cost would come with tiered rate-metering, so I could make a small app feed for free, but a larger app would start to incur costs when I wanted to up the throughput.
- arca_vorago 10y agoAh, fun to see the inevitable cash grab technique overvalued internet tech companies make as they drive off the stockholder cliff. All it takes is a hungry competitor. Maybe time to synthshort twitter. I hope reddit is next.
- hulahoof 10y agoWould this change affect 'anonymous' posters? With KYC legislation anyone with a sufficient amount of followers who was unwilling to be unmasked (via payment trail) would result in removal? I am unfamiliar with the intricacies of the verified account system, so perhaps large anonymous users are already suppressed.
- wenbin 10y agoWeibo already has such subscription thing for quite a while ... Twitter steadily follows Weibo's footsteps to roll out features and business models :)
- aestetix 10y agoI was begging for this five years ago. However, they have messed with so many parts of the service now that I find it almost unusable.
- gregjw 10y agoI wonder how this will impact HootSuite.
- mdekkers 10y ago...here come the ads....
- zargath 10y agoI love using Twitter, but what are the company doing ? As a tech person, I understand that the platform can be difficult to scale, security, fake profiles, etc. But besides that? From an outsider, it seems like everybody is doing operations and no innovation in any area is present. Twitter's homepage is still only a registration to closed social network like Facebook. People dont `get` twitter, and why join when it looks like just a facebook with text-limit? Stop trying to be a social network, I dont have twitter friends. Their trending topics are super nice, but nobody knows about it. All the big tech companies work on speech, but not twitter ? Tweets are mentioned all over the news, but still people are not using Twitter ? I can only imagine the amount of `Trump traffic` generated. Their notifications simply blows! Sorry the rant, I really want Twitter to succeed, because I dont like Facebook, I use Instagram because of family and Snap because of friends. But Twitter is like Hacker News a thing I just love.
- skinnymuch 10y agoI just can't get the appeal of Twitter. Who do you follow on it?
- skynode 10y agoTwitter should leave the platform as is currently and clone into an alternate twitter-verse, ATV, where all kinda vices and foul language would be allowed and supported. Original Twitter would be more intolerant of trolls, related vices and foul language, outrightly deleting transgressing accounts even for incomplete, symbolized hybrids like f*$# and so forth. Subscriptions to ATV would be based only on fake names and related credentials (including email addresses) and subscribers would be able to purchase troll units, (instanceOf)xVice units, etc. To register, you would have to use your original Twitter email address initially and maintain an annual subscription to keep twitter-verse from disclosing your identity on Twitter. The revenue sources from ATV could be expanded further from this point.
- Pigo 10y agoInteresting idea. As someone who's never found Twitter interesting, I'd love to witness such mayhem. I've always felt Twitter is too focused on who is saying what, instead of what was being said by who. Of course even if the content was more interesting, the platform would probably still hinder my curiosity. It's like I'm walking into the middle of someone else's conversation, with little-to-no context.
- RodgerTheGreat 10y agoYou're essentially pitching "4chan, except you have to pay for it, and it's explicitly designed to blackmail you for using it."
- intoverflow2 10y ago> You're essentially pitching "4chan, except you have to pay for it Funny you should bring up 4chan because some people actually do pay a yearly subscription to use it.
- bushin 10y agoThey should name it Leprosorium.