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> Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst it

> Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month. (I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)

xyzzy21 5y ago
I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!
AniseAbyss 5y ago
The very reason why much of the internet is financed by advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a subscription.
zhdc1 5y ago
> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
- pram 5y ago
  This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    And that is totally fine when looking for the "unsexy ad-revenue gain" and not stock appreciation.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Which isn't what anyone is looking for with twitter. That strategy leads to the CEO being fired.
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Their stock would have done better had they done this long ago. Their massive headcount is mostly just a drain on profitability, and very hard to argue there's much value add. Certainly infra, data science etc takes headcount, but last I heard Twitter has hundreds or thousands of product devs and their product has had close to 0 changes in the last 5 years. What do these people do all day, really? I mean, they are flat from their 2013 IPO, while basically every other tech has rocketed.
ldehaan 5y ago
Yeah I quit everything but IRC. Twitter was so gross, I don't miss it, but actually actively wish that it would die. It's SO gross. I can't believe I used that trash for as long as I did, talk about a tool to destroy commonality man. The sooner people quit, the better the world will be, I hope one day it will be seen as akin to smoking in public, the more smokers the more dangerous. Maybe like cigarettes one day it will only be popular in France where all the wokest freaks live.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  I was with you until the ‘woke France’ stuff.
  - xmprt 5y ago
    Which is ironic because France strikes me as one of the least "woke" countries in Europe.
    - TillE 5y ago
      No country is perfect, but French society is pretty notoriously sexist and racist.
      - dang 5y ago
        Please do not post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN. It's one of the things we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      Well funny you say that, but my parents there were telling me about it !! And they cant speak nor read English so there s something going on. I dont follow French stuff much anymore (am in China), but I ve noticed more racial separatism debate in France (like should we do like the US and start defining races in the seemingly positive intention to protect "weak" races or should we continue saying humans are not split in races but are just a messy gradient of weather-dependent attributes losing the ability to target policies at people based on those attributes)
pjc50 5y ago
I'd expect it to be more like 1 in a hundred staying. Certainly I'd take it as an excuse to cut the tie and try to find which discords people had fled to. They'd probably lose a third of their users simply by annoucing the plan. There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
- Nav_Panel 5y ago
  Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. It would be really good for decentralization actually, I kinda want them to do this lmao
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. The Hacker News force is strong in this one. on edit: born of familiarity with the genre here, but no there is not going to be a great upswelling of everyone running to spin up local mastodon instances. Except in some of the techie market, and not even all of us have the time for that.
    - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
      Maybe a bit tangential to the original comment, but starting my potentially controversial rant on Mastodon and Twitter: The real problem with Mastodon, is that it's too similar to Twitter! People try out new sites because they have something different in terms of content creation or consumption (Discord, with its real-time communication and flow of conversations, Tiktok for its instant video creation and consumption, etc...) But Mastodon has nothing new to show off, since it's basically a Twitter clone (yeah, with some extra features like federation, but seriously why use it when you have Twitter?) Mastodon has basically become Twitter for ex-Twitter people who don't want to deal with ratios and wild crowds and have their own "cozy" space. And I've observed people trying to move to Mastodon and realize it's a very quite place and immediately jump back in on Twitter after a month... I understand that there is a niche of people who dig that kind of cozy stuff, but most people still just love the wildness of Twitter where anyone can be commented on, retweeted, quote-tweeted, "ratioed", and "get judged and fucked by the audience". Yes, it's also one of the most horrible and deranged places of the Internet, but people accept that and still log in because we have our own death drives to fulfill. We know that cigarettes and drugs are harmful, but isn't that the point?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mejutoco 5y ago
A move like that could make very transparent how many of those accounts are bots. It seems risky if the active users are inflated (idk if it is the case but it could very well be)
adventured 5y ago
Your take is correct. Twitter would be decimated by requiring $4/month to use it, and that might be generous. Could they even get 5-10 million paying subscribers? Probably initially, however the network would erode rapidly and those paying subscribers would drop off. Someone else would simply step in and fill their shoes with an ad model. The ad model works exceptionally well. Twitter's primary problem is and always has been cost bloat. They should have 30-40% operating income margins; instead it's more like 7%. They have always been very poorly operated and very poorly structured as a business. They did $357m in operating income on $4.8b in sales the last four quarters. When Facebook was that size they had 25-30% operating income margins (while growing very fast), there's no reason Twitter shouldn't be able to at least match that at this stage of their business life (there isn't some great 80% growth surge coming next year that they need to be prepared for, staffing up ahead of time).
- zuminator 5y ago
  They could limit their free tier to say 1000 characters and 10 retweets a day, while retaining unlimited browsing and "likes." If you want more than that, subscribe to Twitter Blue. Or watch a 30 second ad to reload your character/retweet inventory. If they do it right they could get obsessive Tweeters paying $99.99 a pop like free-to-pay gamers trying to max out their gear.
- 3maj 5y ago
  Twitters Revenue/Employee Headcount (not counting any contractors) is currently around 636k/employee. As far as FAANG companies go Twitter has an over bloated workforce.
tomnipotent 5y ago
Agreed, I just don't see it. Subscriber counts for a handful of subscription companies: Netflix: 209M Amazon Prime: 200M Spotify: 165M Disney+: 118M Youtube Premium/Music: 50M Hulu: 44M Charter: 30M NY Times: 8M WaPo: 3M
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  Except for youtube premium you don't have any alternative for the sites available for free. For twitter there is sea of alternatives that does the exact same thing.
  - tomnipotent 5y ago
    > there is sea of alternatives None of them even remotely have Twitter's reach, and more importantly content creators ranging from heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities.
    - brianwawok 5y ago
      Right, but people are not paying $4 to read this. At least 99% of the market would drop off. I literally just log on to see what hilarious things papa elon tweet, without it I would just... do something better with my time.
    - logifail 5y ago
      > heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities I'm reminded of my OH's retort to someone reportedly claiming fluency in multiple languages, "Great, but do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?" I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of information. For me, it's a last-ditch-saloon means to complain to companies who can't or won't publish a customer services email address. That's all.
      - Closi 5y ago
        Absolutely agreed - what’s the thing in common all the listed ‘paid for’ subscriptions have? Good quality content. What’s twitters general concept? 140 word tweets that are intended to have very little thought go into them in general. That to me is poor quality content.
ladon86 5y ago
What about $7.99/mo to apply for and keep a blue check? It’s only displayed if you’re verified _and_ a subscriber.
- robofanatic 5y ago
  or charge few cents per post for users with large number of followers. if you have thousands for followers you should be little careful in terms of what you post. charging money would put some control.
- mortenjorck 5y ago
  The blue check, calling card of the Twitter cultural elite, is such a highly coveted status symbol that it's almost incomprehensible to me that Twitter hasn't come up with a way to directly monetize it. It's an incredible amount of value just sitting there.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    My understanding is that they basically have. If your ad spend is greater than ~$5k, you get a twitter liaison that can fast-track verification.
    - sflicht 5y ago
      Seems self-defeating if any significant number of people, like me, block every individual from whom I see a promoted tweet. (I assume that such tweets are the only way an individual rather than a corporation would have a non negligible ad spend?) I guess not many people do as I do. But promoting one’s stupid tweets is a pretty good indication of someone I do not and will never have any interest in hearing from… I suppose I might make an exception for a sufficiently funny/edgy promoted tweet, but I also suspect that twitter enforces stricter content rules on promoted tweets?
      - ByteJockey 5y ago
        I agree with you. But I think it's a relatively niche position (by niche, I mean less than 1% of the population).
kibibyte 5y ago
I wonder if the author remembers App.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

xyzzy21 5y ago

I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!

AniseAbyss 5y ago

The very reason why much of the internet is financed by advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a subscription.

zhdc1 5y ago

> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.

pram 5y ago
This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  And that is totally fine when looking for the "unsexy ad-revenue gain" and not stock appreciation.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Which isn't what anyone is looking for with twitter. That strategy leads to the CEO being fired.
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Their stock would have done better had they done this long ago. Their massive headcount is mostly just a drain on profitability, and very hard to argue there's much value add. Certainly infra, data science etc takes headcount, but last I heard Twitter has hundreds or thousands of product devs and their product has had close to 0 changes in the last 5 years. What do these people do all day, really? I mean, they are flat from their 2013 IPO, while basically every other tech has rocketed.

ldehaan 5y ago

Yeah I quit everything but IRC. Twitter was so gross, I don't miss it, but actually actively wish that it would die. It's SO gross. I can't believe I used that trash for as long as I did, talk about a tool to destroy commonality man. The sooner people quit, the better the world will be, I hope one day it will be seen as akin to smoking in public, the more smokers the more dangerous. Maybe like cigarettes one day it will only be popular in France where all the wokest freaks live.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
I was with you until the ‘woke France’ stuff.
- xmprt 5y ago
  Which is ironic because France strikes me as one of the least "woke" countries in Europe.
  - TillE 5y ago
    No country is perfect, but French society is pretty notoriously sexist and racist.
    - dang 5y ago
      Please do not post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN. It's one of the things we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Well funny you say that, but my parents there were telling me about it !! And they cant speak nor read English so there s something going on. I dont follow French stuff much anymore (am in China), but I ve noticed more racial separatism debate in France (like should we do like the US and start defining races in the seemingly positive intention to protect "weak" races or should we continue saying humans are not split in races but are just a messy gradient of weather-dependent attributes losing the ability to target policies at people based on those attributes)

pjc50 5y ago

I'd expect it to be more like 1 in a hundred staying. Certainly I'd take it as an excuse to cut the tie and try to find which discords people had fled to. They'd probably lose a third of their users simply by annoucing the plan. There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.

Nav_Panel 5y ago
Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. It would be really good for decentralization actually, I kinda want them to do this lmao
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. The Hacker News force is strong in this one. on edit: born of familiarity with the genre here, but no there is not going to be a great upswelling of everyone running to spin up local mastodon instances. Except in some of the techie market, and not even all of us have the time for that.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    Maybe a bit tangential to the original comment, but starting my potentially controversial rant on Mastodon and Twitter: The real problem with Mastodon, is that it's too similar to Twitter! People try out new sites because they have something different in terms of content creation or consumption (Discord, with its real-time communication and flow of conversations, Tiktok for its instant video creation and consumption, etc...) But Mastodon has nothing new to show off, since it's basically a Twitter clone (yeah, with some extra features like federation, but seriously why use it when you have Twitter?) Mastodon has basically become Twitter for ex-Twitter people who don't want to deal with ratios and wild crowds and have their own "cozy" space. And I've observed people trying to move to Mastodon and realize it's a very quite place and immediately jump back in on Twitter after a month... I understand that there is a niche of people who dig that kind of cozy stuff, but most people still just love the wildness of Twitter where anyone can be commented on, retweeted, quote-tweeted, "ratioed", and "get judged and fucked by the audience". Yes, it's also one of the most horrible and deranged places of the Internet, but people accept that and still log in because we have our own death drives to fulfill. We know that cigarettes and drugs are harmful, but isn't that the point?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mejutoco 5y ago

A move like that could make very transparent how many of those accounts are bots. It seems risky if the active users are inflated (idk if it is the case but it could very well be)

adventured 5y ago

Your take is correct. Twitter would be decimated by requiring $4/month to use it, and that might be generous. Could they even get 5-10 million paying subscribers? Probably initially, however the network would erode rapidly and those paying subscribers would drop off. Someone else would simply step in and fill their shoes with an ad model. The ad model works exceptionally well. Twitter's primary problem is and always has been cost bloat. They should have 30-40% operating income margins; instead it's more like 7%. They have always been very poorly operated and very poorly structured as a business. They did $357m in operating income on $4.8b in sales the last four quarters. When Facebook was that size they had 25-30% operating income margins (while growing very fast), there's no reason Twitter shouldn't be able to at least match that at this stage of their business life (there isn't some great 80% growth surge coming next year that they need to be prepared for, staffing up ahead of time).

zuminator 5y ago
They could limit their free tier to say 1000 characters and 10 retweets a day, while retaining unlimited browsing and "likes." If you want more than that, subscribe to Twitter Blue. Or watch a 30 second ad to reload your character/retweet inventory. If they do it right they could get obsessive Tweeters paying $99.99 a pop like free-to-pay gamers trying to max out their gear.
3maj 5y ago
Twitters Revenue/Employee Headcount (not counting any contractors) is currently around 636k/employee. As far as FAANG companies go Twitter has an over bloated workforce.

tomnipotent 5y ago

Agreed, I just don't see it. Subscriber counts for a handful of subscription companies: Netflix: 209M Amazon Prime: 200M Spotify: 165M Disney+: 118M Youtube Premium/Music: 50M Hulu: 44M Charter: 30M NY Times: 8M WaPo: 3M

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Except for youtube premium you don't have any alternative for the sites available for free. For twitter there is sea of alternatives that does the exact same thing.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  > there is sea of alternatives None of them even remotely have Twitter's reach, and more importantly content creators ranging from heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    Right, but people are not paying $4 to read this. At least 99% of the market would drop off. I literally just log on to see what hilarious things papa elon tweet, without it I would just... do something better with my time.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities I'm reminded of my OH's retort to someone reportedly claiming fluency in multiple languages, "Great, but do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?" I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of information. For me, it's a last-ditch-saloon means to complain to companies who can't or won't publish a customer services email address. That's all.
    - Closi 5y ago
      Absolutely agreed - what’s the thing in common all the listed ‘paid for’ subscriptions have? Good quality content. What’s twitters general concept? 140 word tweets that are intended to have very little thought go into them in general. That to me is poor quality content.

ladon86 5y ago

What about $7.99/mo to apply for and keep a blue check? It’s only displayed if you’re verified _and_ a subscriber.

robofanatic 5y ago
or charge few cents per post for users with large number of followers. if you have thousands for followers you should be little careful in terms of what you post. charging money would put some control.
mortenjorck 5y ago
The blue check, calling card of the Twitter cultural elite, is such a highly coveted status symbol that it's almost incomprehensible to me that Twitter hasn't come up with a way to directly monetize it. It's an incredible amount of value just sitting there.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  My understanding is that they basically have. If your ad spend is greater than ~$5k, you get a twitter liaison that can fast-track verification.
  - sflicht 5y ago
    Seems self-defeating if any significant number of people, like me, block every individual from whom I see a promoted tweet. (I assume that such tweets are the only way an individual rather than a corporation would have a non negligible ad spend?) I guess not many people do as I do. But promoting one’s stupid tweets is a pretty good indication of someone I do not and will never have any interest in hearing from… I suppose I might make an exception for a sufficiently funny/edgy promoted tweet, but I also suspect that twitter enforces stricter content rules on promoted tweets?
    - ByteJockey 5y ago
      I agree with you. But I think it's a relatively niche position (by niche, I mean less than 1% of the population).

kibibyte 5y ago

I wonder if the author remembers App.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net