4 ms·

This is why 8$ is a good idea - the bird will never be free when it can easily be blackmailed by advertisers.

by MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
$8 check marks are never gonna make a significant dent in Twitter's expenses...
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  He would need about 12-13M people to sign up to cover the $1bn/year debt interest. Going to be interesting to see how far he gets in that... [edit: hedge between 12M and 13M]
marricks 4y ago
Free for who to do what with? Sure, “the bird” will be free, in a sense, when it’s profitable and doesn’t care about advertisers, but that freedom is free for Elon to do whatever he wants with it. Not freedom for users or in any other (actually good) sense of that bloated meaningless word.
throw0101a 4y ago
> This is why 8$ is a good idea An ad-independent revenue source is a good idea, but not the blue checkmark program, as it currently means some kind of identity verification, and 'random' folks having it may cause problems: > Want to call yourself Citibank Password Verification? Here's your blue tick, thanks for the $8. Want to say you're the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and announce you're abolishing the police? $8. Call yourself WXBM Local News Arkansas and invent a school shooting? Yours for $8 > Trump is banned? No problem, you can be Trump for 8 dollars, verified by Twitter. Or you can be Barron Trump and "expose the dark truth about your parents". Whatever. Go mad. * https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041 https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > as it currently means some kind of identity verification No. Many random people have been given blue ticks. Some people happen to just wake up and have a blue tick. I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification. Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. They could sign up to Twitter after getting a job at CNN and get blue tick. Blue tick as it is right now is an abused meaningless system now.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification. That's OK. Twitter verification was "Twitter verified this person's identity", not "this person asked Twitter to verify their identity". Twitter can and should do so proactively in scenarios like this. > Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. Yes, they're one of the specific categories permitted to apply laid out at https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts#categories https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit....
- jesuscript 4y ago
  If he requires anyone that wants to use the API to be a verified subscriber, then he’ll kill a lot of bots abusing the api. I would not be shocked if they calculated bandwidth costs of spamming Twitter, and putting an order of magnitude prohibitive price on it.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    Which is irrelevant. The $8 per 'verified' user will never be enough to cover expenses or offset the lost advertising revenue.
runako 4y ago
This popular opinion both overestimates how much consumers will pay for Internet services and underestimates how much advertising space is worth to advertisers. One of the fundamental misunderstandings comes from the fact that one's usage of a site like Twitter is generally worth more to the ad-buying community than to the users themselves. This is why Facebook, arguably the strongest social platform, does not charge its users. Also, users create the content so charging them means you have less inventory to sell.
afavour 4y ago
Twitter paid membership, broadly speaking, is a good idea. The specific plan Musk has to reuse blue ticks to mean something entirely different (and totally devalue them) however… that’s a bad idea.
- iwillbenice 4y ago
Herbstluft 4y ago
Make Twitter premium ad free and bundle with that the feature to curate my timeline as I see fit (no "suggestions", chronological by default). Do this and I will gladly pay ~$5 a month for Twitter. But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? No thank you. I will certainly not pay a company that still treats me like a commodity if I can avoid it.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? The $8 is for algorithmic juice for your tweets and half the normal ads, as well as the blue check.
  - Zerverus 4y ago
    Then Elon increases default Adload by 100% and he makes just as much money and still collects 8$ People are not that stupid
sct202 4y ago
The users who will pay $8/mo are the ones who will be advertising themselves and their content/art/opinions like substack pundits, influencers, streamers, etc.
Flatcircle 4y ago
Pretty soon everything on the internet is gonna cost much more than it does today I'm afraid. A lot of these low prices are subsidized by venture capital as the companies chase market share. For example, Spotify is ludicrously underpriced. Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last.
- brookst 4y ago
  Spotify also notoriously underpays musicians; their cost per stream is less than their competitors[0], and they are betting heavily on regulatory action to lower costs further[1]. So it’s not just VC subsidies, but also other unsustainable distortions. [0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts [1] https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competition-regulator-that-streaming-innovation-risks-being-held-back-by-label-clauses/086595 https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competi...
- pjc50 4y ago
  > Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last. When it launched, it had to compete with "free" via piracy.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> This is why 8$ is a good idea - the bird will never be free when it can easily be blackmailed by advertisers. They’d need something like 20% of what Musk claims is their fake, bot-inflated mDAU—far more than existing blue checks, Blue subscribers, and “heavy tweeters” combined—subscribed at $8 to substitute for advertisers.
- blfr 4y ago
  They don't need to substitute all advertisers, just activist ones wanting to influence Twitter policies.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I don't think there's a lot of advertisers trying to influence Twitter policy. Rather, they just don't want their ads by certain content.
  - Macha 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand how much of it is activism vs risk avoidance.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Advertisers that care what content their ads can be shown around are pretty much all of them. Image management isn’t incidental to advertising, it is the whole point.
hammock 4y ago
If Twitter can be so easily blackmailed by advertisers, what do we think about traditional media, where Pfizer is often the biggest advertiser? Sorry if I am being dangerous/spreading misinformation, just asking the question
- pjc50 4y ago
  This is a real problem! I remember Peter Oborne resigning from the Telegraph over failing to cover HSBC because they were an advertiser. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t... The reverse is quite clear in how various Gulf states like Qatar buy lots of advertising for the state as a whole .. with the unspoken assumption that their poor human rights record won't be mentioned as much.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Blackmailing is when you demand payment/value from someone in return for not revealing damaging information about them. How are advertisers blackmailing Twitter?
  - namelessoracle 4y ago
    What logical reason would Pfizer have other than damaging information being revealed about them? They sell medicine, people don't pick what medicine they get for the most part, their doctor does. (yes there are exceptions) The number of people who would push back against a medicine because "pfizer had ads next a twitter post with racial epithets" seem vanishingly small.
  - hammock 4y ago
    I was only picking up on the term as used by OP. The reality may be closer to extortion (in the colloquial sense)

This is why 8$ is a good idea - the bird will never be free when it can easily be blackmailed by advertisers.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

$8 check marks are never gonna make a significant dent in Twitter's expenses...

zimpenfish 4y ago
He would need about 12-13M people to sign up to cover the $1bn/year debt interest. Going to be interesting to see how far he gets in that... [edit: hedge between 12M and 13M]

marricks 4y ago

Free for who to do what with? Sure, “the bird” will be free, in a sense, when it’s profitable and doesn’t care about advertisers, but that freedom is free for Elon to do whatever he wants with it. Not freedom for users or in any other (actually good) sense of that bloated meaningless word.

throw0101a 4y ago

> This is why 8$ is a good idea An ad-independent revenue source is a good idea, but not the blue checkmark program, as it currently means some kind of identity verification, and 'random' folks having it may cause problems: > Want to call yourself Citibank Password Verification? Here's your blue tick, thanks for the $8. Want to say you're the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and announce you're abolishing the police? $8. Call yourself WXBM Local News Arkansas and invent a school shooting? Yours for $8 > Trump is banned? No problem, you can be Trump for 8 dollars, verified by Twitter. Or you can be Barron Trump and "expose the dark truth about your parents". Whatever. Go mad. * https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041 https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1588306300450263041

philliphaydon 4y ago
> as it currently means some kind of identity verification No. Many random people have been given blue ticks. Some people happen to just wake up and have a blue tick. I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification. Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. They could sign up to Twitter after getting a job at CNN and get blue tick. Blue tick as it is right now is an abused meaningless system now.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > I doubt many celebs went through the process of identity verification. That's OK. Twitter verification was "Twitter verified this person's identity", not "this person asked Twitter to verify their identity". Twitter can and should do so proactively in scenarios like this. > Journalists basically get it for free regardless of their journalistic ability or follower count. Yes, they're one of the specific categories permitted to apply laid out at https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts#categories https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit....
jesuscript 4y ago
If he requires anyone that wants to use the API to be a verified subscriber, then he’ll kill a lot of bots abusing the api. I would not be shocked if they calculated bandwidth costs of spamming Twitter, and putting an order of magnitude prohibitive price on it.
- qwytw 4y ago
  Which is irrelevant. The $8 per 'verified' user will never be enough to cover expenses or offset the lost advertising revenue.

runako 4y ago

This popular opinion both overestimates how much consumers will pay for Internet services and underestimates how much advertising space is worth to advertisers. One of the fundamental misunderstandings comes from the fact that one's usage of a site like Twitter is generally worth more to the ad-buying community than to the users themselves. This is why Facebook, arguably the strongest social platform, does not charge its users. Also, users create the content so charging them means you have less inventory to sell.

afavour 4y ago

Twitter paid membership, broadly speaking, is a good idea. The specific plan Musk has to reuse blue ticks to mean something entirely different (and totally devalue them) however… that’s a bad idea.

iwillbenice 4y ago

Herbstluft 4y ago

Make Twitter premium ad free and bundle with that the feature to curate my timeline as I see fit (no "suggestions", chronological by default). Do this and I will gladly pay ~$5 a month for Twitter. But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? No thank you. I will certainly not pay a company that still treats me like a commodity if I can avoid it.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> But $8 for a blue checkmark and ads? The $8 is for algorithmic juice for your tweets and half the normal ads, as well as the blue check.
- Zerverus 4y ago
  Then Elon increases default Adload by 100% and he makes just as much money and still collects 8$ People are not that stupid

sct202 4y ago

The users who will pay $8/mo are the ones who will be advertising themselves and their content/art/opinions like substack pundits, influencers, streamers, etc.

Flatcircle 4y ago

Pretty soon everything on the internet is gonna cost much more than it does today I'm afraid. A lot of these low prices are subsidized by venture capital as the companies chase market share. For example, Spotify is ludicrously underpriced. Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last.

brookst 4y ago
Spotify also notoriously underpays musicians; their cost per stream is less than their competitors[0], and they are betting heavily on regulatory action to lower costs further[1]. So it’s not just VC subsidies, but also other unsustainable distortions. [0] https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts [1] https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competition-regulator-that-streaming-innovation-risks-being-held-back-by-label-clauses/086595 https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/spotify-tells-competi...
pjc50 4y ago
> Less than 10 bucks a month to hear basically every song ever recorded? Not sure that can last. When it launched, it had to compete with "free" via piracy.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> This is why 8$ is a good idea - the bird will never be free when it can easily be blackmailed by advertisers. They’d need something like 20% of what Musk claims is their fake, bot-inflated mDAU—far more than existing blue checks, Blue subscribers, and “heavy tweeters” combined—subscribed at $8 to substitute for advertisers.

blfr 4y ago
They don't need to substitute all advertisers, just activist ones wanting to influence Twitter policies.
- kodah 4y ago
  I don't think there's a lot of advertisers trying to influence Twitter policy. Rather, they just don't want their ads by certain content.
- Macha 4y ago
  I think you misunderstand how much of it is activism vs risk avoidance.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Advertisers that care what content their ads can be shown around are pretty much all of them. Image management isn’t incidental to advertising, it is the whole point.

hammock 4y ago

If Twitter can be so easily blackmailed by advertisers, what do we think about traditional media, where Pfizer is often the biggest advertiser? Sorry if I am being dangerous/spreading misinformation, just asking the question

pjc50 4y ago
This is a real problem! I remember Peter Oborne resigning from the Telegraph over failing to cover HSBC because they were an advertiser. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-telegraph-hsbc-coverage-fraud-readers https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/17/peter-oborne-t... The reverse is quite clear in how various Gulf states like Qatar buy lots of advertising for the state as a whole .. with the unspoken assumption that their poor human rights record won't be mentioned as much.
andsoitis 4y ago
Blackmailing is when you demand payment/value from someone in return for not revealing damaging information about them. How are advertisers blackmailing Twitter?
- namelessoracle 4y ago
  What logical reason would Pfizer have other than damaging information being revealed about them? They sell medicine, people don't pick what medicine they get for the most part, their doctor does. (yes there are exceptions) The number of people who would push back against a medicine because "pfizer had ads next a twitter post with racial epithets" seem vanishingly small.
- hammock 4y ago
  I was only picking up on the term as used by OP. The reality may be closer to extortion (in the colloquial sense)