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I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal

I don’t understand why platforms like Twitter don’t make money the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade, people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people pay for cool set of emotes. Or different colors, etc. That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.

dematz 5y ago
It should be increasingly expensive and time consuming to add more sides to your profile shape, eg pentagon->hexagon is a step up. Adding enough sides to be a circle, or indistinguishable from one on a pixelated screen, would be very prestigious. Of course, this dimension might be disrupted by block...
- dgellow 5y ago
  You might find it silly but people pay a lot of money to feel they look different from the rest of the crowd. And they are happy doing so.
Axsuul 5y ago
Understandably so because I'm not sure Twitter wants their platform to end up looking like MySpace. Furthermore, these visual customizations are very hard to translate to the plethora of other clients users use to consume Twitter. I think Twitter has massive opportunity though with their power users. Many of them are definitely willing to spend $100+/mo just based on the value they get out of it alone if they can get access to power user analytics, insights, data, or better tools to engage with their audience. Assuming 1% of their users are power users, that's around 3M users with a market opportunity exceeding $3B annually.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Paid emotes or profile customization does not result in MySpace. It can be done in a subtle way. They actually do something like this with their NFT profile picture (the certified owner has a different profile shape). And is trivial to support in new clients when you’re a tech company with talents Twitter has. Seriously, that has been developed by game companies since a while now, people pay for showing to their friends their cool little golden label. Twitter has the advantage of not being a serious platform, people are there to shitpost, create and follow drama, or other type of crowd interactions. And users already show of their affiliation, how cool and trendy they are using their bio and username. Imagine for example a 1-month “official Marvel fan” banner for $$ at the time of release of a big marvel movie, people would pay for this.

dematz 5y ago

It should be increasingly expensive and time consuming to add more sides to your profile shape, eg pentagon->hexagon is a step up. Adding enough sides to be a circle, or indistinguishable from one on a pixelated screen, would be very prestigious. Of course, this dimension might be disrupted by block...

dgellow 5y ago
You might find it silly but people pay a lot of money to feel they look different from the rest of the crowd. And they are happy doing so.

Axsuul 5y ago

Understandably so because I'm not sure Twitter wants their platform to end up looking like MySpace. Furthermore, these visual customizations are very hard to translate to the plethora of other clients users use to consume Twitter. I think Twitter has massive opportunity though with their power users. Many of them are definitely willing to spend $100+/mo just based on the value they get out of it alone if they can get access to power user analytics, insights, data, or better tools to engage with their audience. Assuming 1% of their users are power users, that's around 3M users with a market opportunity exceeding $3B annually.

dgellow 5y ago
Paid emotes or profile customization does not result in MySpace. It can be done in a subtle way. They actually do something like this with their NFT profile picture (the certified owner has a different profile shape). And is trivial to support in new clients when you’re a tech company with talents Twitter has. Seriously, that has been developed by game companies since a while now, people pay for showing to their friends their cool little golden label. Twitter has the advantage of not being a serious platform, people are there to shitpost, create and follow drama, or other type of crowd interactions. And users already show of their affiliation, how cool and trendy they are using their bio and username. Imagine for example a 1-month “official Marvel fan” banner for $$ at the time of release of a big marvel movie, people would pay for this.